How do you uninstall the rubygem application?

Question

We have installed the rubygem application (version 1.3.6) on a Debian system by downloading the rubygems tar.gz archive and running the setup.rb command.

What is the best way to uninstall this application?

Answer 1

In future, if you have to install from tar.gz files, it's worth using the excellent "checkinstall" program, you just preceded the install command (whatever that might be) with "checkinstall", which will create a deb package and then install it.

You might be able to reinstall rubygems now using checkinstall and then remove it immediately afterwards with dpkg -r packagename.

Answer 2

Here's what I did to remove rubygems installed from .tar.gz on a Ubuntu system:

aptitude install checkinstall
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/69365/rubygems-1.3.6.tgz
tar xfvz rubygems-1.3.6.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.6
checkinstall ruby setup.rb

When asked, give it a name 'rubygems'. At this moment we have reinstalled the rubygems. Now we need to uninstall it:

dpkg -r rubygems
rm /usr/bin/gem1.8

And that's it. Clean uninstall of rubygems.

Btw: it's recommended to uninstall all gems prior to this, by doing gem uninstall <gem-name> on each gem.

Answer 3

Do you mean a specific gem like haml or something, or do you mean the whole gem management system?

To uninstall a gem:

gem uninstall NAME_OF_THE_GEM 

Use sudo if you are not root.

To uninstall ruby gems management system:

You have to options: 1) if you used REE - then jsut wipe REE folder and reinstall that same version again. By default REE is installed in /opt/ruby-enterprise-version-number/

2) if you used stock ruby (apt-get) then it's a little more complicated: Find where ruby is environment sitting:

ruby -e 'puts $:'

Should be something like /usr/local/lib/ruby

change to the directory that has lib/site_ruby/1.8 in it. Based on you environment that could vary.

rm -r rubygems.rb ubygems.rb rubygems

Also remove gem executable.

which gem

Will tell you where executable for gem is sitting By default it should be in: /usr/local/bin/gem & /usr/bin/gem1.8 - just rm -rf on this two items and you are good to go. In the future thou, I highly suggest you use: either Ruby Enterprise Edition (http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/) - it's GPL, free, and has very good and stable reputation - also runs great with Passenger, if you need to deploy rails apps or use apt-get or aptitude.