How do I completely uninstall rails, ruby and rubygems?

JZ. picture JZ. · Mar 12, 2010 · Viewed 35.4k times · Source

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!

Answer

raptor picture raptor · Jun 30, 2011

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)