Gem Cleanup

25th Nov 2008 | Tags: ruby osx

The latest version of rubygems seems to be more gung-ho about trying to clean up old versions of gems. This is fine, except that OSX seems to be very protective of its bundled gem directory, refusing to uninstall gems located there even though I’m running the gem command via sudo.

As a result, while gem list tells me that I’ve got activerecord v 2.2.2 and 1.15.6 installed, gem cleanup fails miserably:

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jamie@juliet ~> sudo gem cleanup
Cleaning up installed gems...
Attempting to uninstall activerecord-1.15.6
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError)
    Unknown gem activerecord = 1.15.6

I appreciate Leopard not wanting to break the bundled versions of gems, but having a functioning gem cleanup is helpful to me. Turns out it’s pretty easy to just prevent rubygems from checking the Ruby.framework gem path, just create (or edit) ~/.gemrc and include the following:

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gempath:
  - /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8
  - /Users/jamie/.gem/ruby/1.8

Of course, you’ll need to use your own username on the last line there, and you might want to double-check the existing GEM PATH values from gem env output so you don’t accidentally clobber anything else. Also, if you’ve got a previously-generated .gemrc, the gempath key needs to be a string, not a symbol, or else it won’t get picked up. Whee.