Cleaning up Ruby Gems on Mac OS X

This has come up a few times for me and searching the Internet failed to turn up any satisfying solutions. In particular, I wanted to update the Ruby Gems on my Mac and subsequently remove the old versions. I found that certain gems would not go away when the gem cleanup command was invoked.

# gem list
*** LOCAL GEMS ***
actionmailer (2.3.5, 2.2.2, 1.3.6)
actionpack (2.3.5, 2.2.2, 1.13.6)
actionwebservice (1.2.6)
activerecord (2.3.5, 2.2.2, 1.15.6)
...
# gem cleanup
Cleaning up installed gems...
Attempting to uninstall fastthread-1.0.1
Unable to uninstall fastthread-1.0.1:
	Gem::InstallError: cannot uninstall, check `gem list -d fastthread`
...

It seems that (Snow) Leopard comes bundled with a plethora of Ruby gems, all of which are installed in /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8. Meanwhile, the gem install command puts new gems in /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8, as shown with the -d option to gem list:

# gem list -d fastthread
*** LOCAL GEMS ***
fastthread (1.0.7, 1.0.1)
    Author: MenTaLguY
    Rubyforge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/mongrel
    Installed at (1.0.7): /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8
                 (1.0.1): /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
    Optimized replacement for thread.rb primitives

Some folks have said to simply leave the old gems in place, while others have suggested deleting the old gems from the /System/Library location using rm. Neither solution is all that appealing to me.

The solution I was looking for, it seems, is rather simple and involves nothing more than setting the GEM_HOME environment variable before running the gem cleanup command.

# export GEM_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
# gem cleanup
...
Attempting to uninstall rake-0.8.3
Executables and scripts will remain installed.
Successfully uninstalled rake-0.8.3
Clean Up Complete
# unset GEM_HOME

And that will do it, all of the outdated gems are removed and I didn’t have to perform file system surgery. Yay!

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