Removing all installed Gems and starting over

Question

I recently started learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and have watched a plethora of getting started materials. I have been finding lately that I keep getting errors where gems won't install or they will be installed but they can't be used for some reason, and I have decided that I want to remove everything down to once again just having Ruby installed and start over with the installation. One training video had me install most of my gems with RVM, so I don't know if that changes anything.

So in short my question is "How to I get rid of RVM, Rubygems, and all installed Gems so that I can start over with just Ruby?"

Edit: I am on Mac OS 10.6

Solution 1

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

Solution 2

gem uninstall -aIx

Uninstalls all gems without prompt.

Options

-a, --[no-]all                   Uninstall all matching versions
-I, --[no-]ignore-dependencies   Ignore dependency requirements while
                                 uninstalling
-x, --[no-]executables           Uninstall applicable executables without
                                 confirmation

Solution 3

For Windows and Unix copy/paste in command prompt (Ruby 1.9.x).

ruby -e "`gem list`.split(/$/).each { |line| puts `gem uninstall -Iax #{line.split(' ')[0]}` unless line.strip.empty? }"

Solution 4

using RVM, you could just type...

rvm gemset empty GEMSET

where GEMSET is the gemset which you would like to empty. then...

install bundle

yum install bundler and finally

bundle install

Solution 5

rvm implode (see cli docs) seems to work - and it even tells you where to look at for leftovers

View more solutions

Comments

[Dave Long]

I just ran that, but gems is still installed. It does however look like it reloaded it. Not sure if it reloaded with defaults from Mac XCode or what...

[michaelmichael]

added another line to get rid of the gems you added pre-RVM

[timmfin]

I'd add the '-all -x -I' options to gem uninstall to prevent it from prompting you (for binaries, versions, or dependencies) while uninstalling.

[Daniel Rehner]

For reference, the full command is: for x in `gem list --no-versions`; do gem uninstall $x -a -x -I; done

[trisweb]

For more reference, another option: gem list --no-versions | xargs gem uninstall -aIx

[isomorphismes]

ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::CommandLineError) Please specify at least one gem name (e.g. gem build GEMNAME) -e:1: no .<digit> floating literal anymore; put 0 before dot bundle (0.0.1) ^ -e:1: syntax error, unexpected tINTEGER bundle (0.0.1) ^

[Haris Krajina]

@isomorphismes not sure if I have fixed it, but you can try command now.

[konung]

This actually works quite nicely with rbenv as well on Debian

[mpowered]

This is technically the most correct answer and exactly what it was designed for.

[raingod]

doing this gave me the following error once i ran it and ran bundle install: ``` ~/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.5.0@global/bin/bundle: No such file or directory```

[Nein]

"implode - removes all ruby installations it manages, everything in ~/.rvm"

[user2023370]

That gives me: ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError) gist is not installed in GEM_HOME, try: gem uninstall -i /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all gist

[Mark Gavagan]

"implode does not uninstall the RVM itself. Basically, there is no way to automatically uninstall RVM other than manually cleaning up everything that the installation did to your system. And that’s a huge downside. The only way to uninstall RVM is to manually clean up everything it did to your system." source: duseev.com/articles/rbenv-vs-rvm NOTE: I'm a novice and unqualified to determine whether the advice in the article is accurate.

[chesterbr]

@MarkGavagan I agree it does not do everything, but it will tell you what else needs to be done (what I refer to above as "leftovers"). In fact, that very article's step zero on uninstalling rvm is... rvm impode :-)

[Zuzu Softman]

then you should do as it suggest. then after that, rerun gem uninstall -aIx again. repeat if error occured for other gem untill it finisehd

[Beyar]

Does this have the same effect as rvm gemset empty GEMSET?

[chesterbr]

@Beyar I'm not super familiar with rvm gemset, but I think it won't remove the rvm tooling (including the rvm utility itself), nor the extra files that rvm implode will inform you about.

[jox]

You might want to grep for 'default:' instead (including the colon) since there are quite a few gems that include "default" in their name.