Getting Rid of Ruby Gems That Won't Die

getting rid of ruby gems that won't die

Assuming that gem clean (or sudo gem clean) doesn't work, I would try the following to totally remove all gems from your system:

You can see where gems have been installed by running the command:

gem env paths

To remove all the gems on your system, simply remove the folders returned by this command.

Additionally, on OSX Leopard, default gems are installed in this folder:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8

If this folder exists on your system, as before you can remove this folder to ensure all gems are deleted.

What is the best way to uninstall gems from a rails3 project?

Bundler is launched from your app's root directory so it makes sure all needed gems are present to get your app working.If for some reason you no longer need a gem you'll have to run the

    gem uninstall gem_name 

as you stated above.So every time you run bundler it'll recheck dependencies

EDIT - 24.12.2014

I see that people keep coming to this question I decided to add a little something.
The answer I gave was for the case when you maintain your gems global. Consider using a gem manager such as rbenv or rvm to keep sets of gems scoped to specific projects.

This means that no gems will be installed at a global level and therefore when you remove one from your project's Gemfile and rerun bundle then it, obviously, won't be loaded in your project. Then, you can run bundle clean (with the project dir) and it will remove from the system all those gems that were once installed from your Gemfile (in the same dir) but at this given time are no longer listed there.... long story short - it removes unused gems.

Gem::Install Error

After some long searches it turns out the reason is because of a non-existent path. The cannot uninstall comes up because the system doesn't search /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8

On a granular level, instead of gem cleanup rails, you can simply use the uninstall command and type:

gem uninstall rails -i /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8

Then you might hit another problem related to a non-existent path, at which point, you should create a directory using the command:

mkdir /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/bin

Now all uninstalls should work well. I recommend doing a clean gem reinstall by performing the following functions:

create a list of all existing gems

gem list --no-versions | sed -e '/^(*|$)/d' > installed_gems

uninstall all existing gems

gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs gem uninstall -aIx

reinstalling latest gems

cat installed_gems | xargs sudo gem install

Removing all installed Gems and starting over

From the RVM support site:

RVM installs everything into ~/.rvm.
To remove RVM from your system run 'rm
-rf ~/.rvm'. You may have one additional config file in ~/.rvmrc and
of course the RVM hook in your
bash/zsh startup files.

So, just go to the command line and type rm -rf ~/.rvm

All the installed gems are in the ~/.rvm folders, so doing the above will remove the gems and installed rubies in one go.

Gems you added pre-RVM with the default ruby install can be removed by typing this at the command prompt:

for x in `gem list --no-versions`; do gem uninstall $x -a -x -I; done

Having issues installing ruby gems after latest OS X El Capitan update

Don't forget that installing things into the system Ruby requires sudo privileges, /Library is usually restricted access.

Installing your own personal Ruby with rvm or rbenv avoids all this.

How to Reverse a Migration that Requires a Gem

Create the migration to do QC::Setup.drop and run it.

Then delete the original AddQueueClassic migration altogether.

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