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Asked: 2026-05-26T12:52:08+00:00

I’m having problems with Ruby scripts finding the right gems. It seems this is

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I’m having problems with Ruby scripts finding the right gems. It seems this is related to having multiple installs of Ruby on my system. OS X already comes with Ruby but it’s not the latest one. I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion and suddenly have all these instances of the rubygems folders:

 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems
 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.7.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems
 /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rubygems-update-1.8.11/lib/rubygems
 /Library/Frameworks/MacRuby.framework/Versions/0.10/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.2/rubygems
 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems 
 /Users/[user_name]/.rvm/repos/ruby/lib/rubygems

I installed the graph gem with gem install and I can’t seem to find it in any of these locations. irb finds it when I do a require but a ruby script saved and run from the CLI produces the error:

‘require’: no such file to load

Another clue is that when running rails server I often see output from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/

But the graph gem doesn’t seem to be in that path either.

So, yes a big mess. Any help to safely simplify this and remove the redundant instances would be greatly appreciated.

Update:

Was able to track the installed gems to:
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/lib/ruby/user-gems/1.8/gems

So should I just delete everything else with a rm -rf? I’d hate to do that and cause all sorts of dependency problems. Ultimately I’d like to end up with a clean system with only one ruby install but I cannot wipe out my hard drive.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I recommend you use rvm to switch rubies and gems. put a .rvmrc into your project folders and it will switch a “gemset” automatically for you.

    The general consensus is to leave the ruby version of the os as it is an use either rvm or rbenv to switch ruby versions.

    It does look like you have rvm installed as well as multiple ruby installation installed in different ways too.

    Does rvm work correctly, if so you can ignore your other ruby installations.

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