How to uninstall all gems installed using `bundle install`

Question

How can I remove all the gems installed using bundle install in a particular RoR project. I don\'t want to uninstall gems that are used by other projects.

Answer 1

It is actually as simple as

gem list --no-versions | xargs gem uninstall -a

If you are not using RVM/RBENV, you might hit into issue when gem attempts to uninstall system library which can fail. In that case, call uninstall command one by one to skip these.

gem list --no-versions | xargs -n1 gem uninstall -a

Answer 2

If your problem is similar to mine, then you want to uninstall all gems that were installed while testing GemFile changes, in that case I simply used:

bundle clean

That uninstalled all the gems that are not specified in the GemFile and GemFile.lock.

I have not tested it but I suppose you could delete all lines from your Gemfile and run the above command to get rid of all the gems installed by the ROR project in the current directory.

Answer 3

Found solution for uninstalling all gems except of default:

Crete delete_gems.rb with

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# Remove all gems EXCEPT defaults :)

`gem list -d`.split(/\n\n^(?=\w)/).each do |data|
  match = data.match(/(?<name>([^\s]+)) \((?<versions>.*)\)/)
  name = match[:name]
  versions = match[:versions].split(', ')

  if match = data.match(/^.*\(([\d\.]*),? ?default\): .*$/)
    next if match[1].empty? # it's the only version if this match is empty
    versions.delete(match[1] || versions[0])
  end

  versions.each { |v| system "gem uninstall -Ix #{name} -v #{v}" }
end

Run this script:

sudo chmod 1777 delete_gems.rb
./delete_gems.rb

All gems will be removed except of default. Here link on original solution http://zanshin.net/2013/06/10/how-to-delete-all-ruby-gems/

Answer 4

As others have mentioned you could use rvm. To list all available gemsets

rvm gemset list

And then

rvm gemset empty <gemset-name>

Answer 5

Comment out all gems in your Gemfile and run

bundle clean --force

Answer 6

Another way from https://makandracards.com/jan0sch/9537-uninstall-all-ruby-gems-from-your-system (similar to rainkinz's answer and Ralph's comment). Here are some variations:

# if you're the root user:
gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs -I % gem uninstall -aIx %

# if you're a non-root user:
gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs -I % sudo gem uninstall -aIx %

# docker compose (if your service is named "web" running the root user):
docker-compose run web bash -c 'gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs -I % gem uninstall -aIx %'

####

gem install bundler
# or if using docker compose:
docker-compose run web gem install bundler

# optionally reinstall gems:
bundle install
# or if using docker compose:
docker-compose run web bundle install

Breaking this down:

• gem list lists all gems
• cut -d" " -f1 takes the first column
• xargs -I % gem uninstall -aIx % calls gem uninstall -aIx with each output line as an argument

Note that I specified the argument with -I as % and passed it directly for security:

xargs -I % gem uninstall -aIx %

instead of:

xargs gem uninstall -aIx

That's because xargs has a security issue where options like -n can be passed to its command and cause unexpected results. This can be demonstrated with the following example:

# correctly prints "-n hello" (with trailing newline):
echo '-n Hello' | xargs -I % echo % | xargs -I % echo %

# incorrectly prints "hello" (without trailing newline):
echo '-n Hello' | xargs echo