How do I completely uninstall rails, ruby and rubygems?

Question

My system is F'd. How do I completely uninstall rails, ruby and rubygems?

any suggestions on where to go to reinstall from scratch? Best practices? I'd like to get back to 3.0 beta

Thanks!

score 26 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 30 '11 at 11:06

You can use gem uninstall to delete all gems as follows:

gem list --no-version | xargs gem uninstall

If you want to keep eg. the gem rake:

gem list --no-version | grep -v "rake" | xargs gem uninstall

To delete only the old versions, you can run gem clean.

Also, it is possible to write all gems in a list:

gem list --no-version > gem_list.txt

and define these you want to delete:

cat gem_list.txt | xargs gem uninstall

or install:

cat gem_list.txt | xargs gem install

(eventually you have to put a sudo in front of a gem command. On windows use an unix console enviroment like msysGit)

Thanks! This was hot. I modified it a bit to automatically remove all bin executables and every version of a gem: 'gem list --no-version | sudo xargs gem uninstall $1 -a -x' — Chuck Bergeron, Feb 11 '12 at 17:53

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 01 '12 at 02:04

9

I suggest you to simply uninstall all Gems using gem uninstall [name_of_gem], then use RVM to install a new Ruby version and make it the default one.

RVM also makes incredibly easy to remove a Ruby version and all its data since it installs everything in a folder within your home directory.

edited Apr 01 '12 at 02:04

Joseph Ravenwolfe

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answered Mar 12 '10 at 08:35

Simone Carletti

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 05 '15 at 10:07

2

Use

$gem clean

for delete all the gems.

answered Aug 05 '15 at 10:07

Ravi Kant

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How do I completely uninstall rails, ruby and rubygems?

3 Answers3

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