How do I completely uninstall rails, ruby and rubygems?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

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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)

Answer 2

Use

$gem clean

for delete all the gems.

Answer 3

I suggest you to simply uninstall all Gems using gem uninstall [name_of_gem], then use RVM to install a new Ruby version and make it the default one.

RVM also makes incredibly easy to remove a Ruby version and all its data since it installs everything in a folder within your home directory.