Question

I like that Rails 3 is so easy to install: gem install rails --pre, and all of the dependencies are automatically installed for you. But, what about uninstalling it? If I just do gem uninstall rails, I still have

actionmailer (3.0.0.beta3)
actionpack (3.0.0.beta3)
activemodel (3.0.0.beta3)
activerecord (3.0.0.beta3)
activeresource (3.0.0.beta3)
activesupport (3.0.0.beta3)

which I want to get rid of. What’s the easiest way to do so?

Answer 1

if you’re planning to upgrade to a newer version of rails, you can do:

sudo gem clean

or in newer versions

sudo gem cleanup

after the newer version has been installed, this uninstall All older versions of All your gems leaving only the latest version in your system.

Note: these days I use RVM gemset and/or bundler to manage my gems, if you’re using RVM I find it’s a lot simpler this way. For example you can create a new gemset for each project:

rvm gemset create project_name
rvm gemset use project_name
bundle install

anything goes wrong you can just delete the gemset and start again

rvm gemset delete project_name