RoR - How to remove Rails 4.1.1 version?

Question

I am new to RoR and I tried to follow the Ruby on Rails Tutorial from Micheal Hartl. Before starting the tutorial I already set up everything earlier and updated the Rails version to 4.1.1 and everything worked well until the point in the tutorial where I needed to have max 4.0.5 version of Rails in order to proceed with the example. In order to do so I tried several things. First I run:

gem uninstall rails

after which I received the message that it was uninstalled but when running rails -v I still had 4.1.1. Then,following one answer on stackoverflow, to uninstall railties, I did:

gem uninstall railties 4.1.1

after which when running: rails -v I got a message that version 3.2.18 was running which was the one I installed as part of the railsinstaller. Unfortunately, after creating a new app it stopped on the bundle install and didn't continue, for several times. Then I tried to remove all the gems in order to install everything from scratch. I did it with:

ruby -e "gem list.split(/$/).each { |line| puts gem uninstall -Iax #{line.split(' ')[0]} unless line.strip.empty? }"

which I also found here. It did remove the gems, after which I uninstalled Ruby. Then I installed everything again with the railsinstaller which has Rails version 3.2.18. When it finished and when I opened the cmd, in the Rails Environment Configuration under Rails version I could see again version 4.1.1. When i ran:

gem uninstall rails

it uninstalled the 3.2.18 version, the correct one. I installed everything again, hoping that the correct version is installed and that showing the 4.1.1 is a minor bug, but the bundler install still didn't work normally when creating a new app. Right now, after several tries, I tried to leave it as is, not to uninstall anything but to try to install the 4.0.5 version besides. First it installed railties and rails 4.1.1 and then I got an error: could not find a valid gem '4.0.5'.

I checked for several questions and answers, trying to set it up the whole day but it didn't work out. I tried to write details so you can understand better since there were similar questions but not targeting the exact same problem I have. Whatever I did I finished up with many gems with version 4.1.1 still being in the folders. I hope somebody will know what to do and how to remove the previous version forevr. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

First find the rails gem directory.

There are many ways to do it, such as looking in your GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH

echo $GEM_HOME
echo $GEM_PATH

Here's a brute-force way:

find / -type d -name rails-4.1.1 

This may find multiple directories, such as the system's gem directory, cache, docs, bundler directory, ruby versioning directories for RVM or chruby, etc.

If you're the only user of the system, then remove all of these.

Immediately verify that 4.1.1 is gone:

# Show the executable, if any
which rails  

# Show the version, which should not say 4.1.1
rails --version

# If you're within a bundle directory
bundle exec rails --version

Do NOT bundle yet.

Edit your Gemfile, which may also be asking for Rails 4.1.1, and set the exact Rails version that you want:

gem 'rails', '= 4.0.5'

Now bundle:

bundle update

Verify that rails 4.1.1 is not in your Gemfile nor lock:

grep 4.1.1 Gemfile Gemfile.lock

Answer 2

If you're using bundler (which is highly recommended), you should be able to use different versions of gems for different applications

--

Have you tried this:

In your Gemfile, make sure you have the correct version of Rails referenced -
gem 'rails', '3.2.0'

In your app directory - bundle install

--

This will use bundler to install the respective gems for your app, which can change as required