Uninstalling all gems Ruby 2.0.0

Question

It seems that ruby 2.0.0 has added "default" gems to the mix and makes them non removable by gem uninstall.

How can you remove all non default gems?

Countersign

Can you provide example of gems & how you installed Ruby 2.0 (manually? rvm?) – Announce

I used rbenv to install ruby 2.0.0-p0. Gems that are "default" for me at least are: bigdecimal 1.2.0, io-console 0.4.2, json 1.7.7, minitest 4.3.2, psych 2.0.0, rake 0.9.6, rdoc 4.0.0, test-unit 2.0.0.0. gem uninstall json errors with gem "json" cannot be uninstalled because it is a default gem. – Countersign

Sorry, misunderstood. I never delete gems, not sure one would. Why do you need anything else than gem cleanup? – Announce

Sometimes I just want to get rid of things. Cleanup is probably what most people need most of the time. There are times however I want to get rid of all gems to test bash scripts that need to install things like gems. – Countersign

rvm has gemsets, not sure about rbenv – Announce

I'm working with a system atm that has ruby without rvm or rbenv. But I agree if I has rvm a simple rvm gemset empty would do :) – Countersign

Answer 1

I used this one line script.

for i in `gem list --no-versions`; do gem uninstall -aIx $i; done

It ignores default gem errors and just proceeds. Simple and self-evident.

Krupp

That's a simpler solution for this problem, assuming rubygems continues to work this way :) – Countersign

Nice work! You don't see a lot of terse shell commands posted using a loop. – Yearround

Does not work. still get 'cannot be uninstalled because it is a default gem' errors. – Dorsum

@Dorsum It's normal. You can just ignore it. If you mean the command stops after the first error, type set +e and try again. – Krupp

@Krupp would know if this works gem list --no-version | awk 'NR>1{ print $(NF-1) }' | xargs gem 2>/dev/null uninstall -aIx it doesn't error but it also doesn't uninstall the gems. I assume the command still stops executing when error occurs (even if it gets redirected) – Ultravirus

If using zsh, you can be even shorter (only in the cli, not as a script), for i in $(gem list --no-versions); gem uninstall -aIx $i. – Pharyngology

Answer 2

First, go to the gems directory Like ../ruby/2.0.0-p195/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/specifications
You will find a directory named default, which including all the default gems shipped with ruby 2.0

Move all the *.gemspec stored in default dir to specifications dir and remove the empty default dir.

Then you can do whatever you want like old days.:-)

Schumer

What is the specification directory used for now? It's in the load path I assume? – Countersign

This worked for me. The "solutions" in other SO questions, github & even the ruby gem docs did not work. – Penny

Answer 3

I wrote a script in ruby to remove all non default gems.

https://gist.github.com/nixpulvis/5042764

This is needed now because unlike before 2.0.0 some gems are labeled "default" with the installation of ruby, and cannot be uninstalled with gem uninstall. This makes the previously popular methods for deleting all gems not work.

For reference here it is.
gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs gem uninstall

Countersign

The supplied link no longer exists. "OH NOES, 404". Is there somewhere else this script exists, or is the "for reference" line the entire script? – Punic

Thanks. I changed my username. The URL is fixed. – Countersign

this crashes for default gems – Legume

this doesn't work for cases where there are multiple versions for any specific gem – Pentangular

Answer 4

I have not yet found a better answer than to exclude the "default" gems:

/usr/local/bin/gem list --no-versions | \
grep -v -E "(bigdecimal|io-console|json|minitest|psych|rake|rdoc|test-unit)" | \
xargs --no-run-if-empty /usr/local/bin/gem uninstall --executables --user-install --all --force

Flagstaff

This code is assuming you installed ruby 2.0 from source on Linux. – Flagstaff