gem won’t install Ruby gems on VPS…
Having trouble installing Ruby gems on your VPS? Gem was hanging on my Slicehost slice (running Ubuntu Hardy with 256MB of RAM) at “Bulk updating [...]“:
$ gem update
Updating installed gems...
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Updating installed gems...
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
It was also gobbling up CPU and memory.
Why does gem hang?
The distro package for Gem is very old, and this old version uses a lot of memory, causing lots of disk thrashing. Since hard disks are, ahem, a bit slower than RAM, this increases gem’s run time by probably a few orders of magnitude.
Solution
Update gem manually:
$ wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/57642/rubygems-update-1.3.4.gem
$ sudo gem install rubygems-update-1.3.4.gem
$ sudo /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/update_rubygems
Installing RubyGems 1.3.4
Installing RubyGems
Installing gem executable
Removing old source_cache files
Removing old RubyGems RDoc and ri
Installing rubygems-1.3.4 ri into /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/doc/rubygems-1.3.4/ri
Installing rubygems-1.3.4 rdoc into /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/doc/rubygems-1.3.4/rdoc
RubyGems installed the following executables:
/usr/bin/gem1.8
$ sudo gem install rubygems-update-1.3.4.gem
$ sudo /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/update_rubygems
Installing RubyGems 1.3.4
Installing RubyGems
Installing gem executable
Removing old source_cache files
Removing old RubyGems RDoc and ri
Installing rubygems-1.3.4 ri into /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/doc/rubygems-1.3.4/ri
Installing rubygems-1.3.4 rdoc into /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/doc/rubygems-1.3.4/rdoc
RubyGems installed the following executables:
/usr/bin/gem1.8
Looks like everything’s OK, but gem didn’t work anymore:
$ sudo gem install haml
/usr/bin/gem:10: undefined method `manage_gems' for Gem:Module (NoMethodError)
/usr/bin/gem:10: undefined method `manage_gems' for Gem:Module (NoMethodError)
What gives? Notice the path, /usr/bin/gem. Is that still the old version?
$ ls -lah /usr/bin/gem*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 701 Nov 19 2007 /usr/bin/gem
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 545 Jul 28 00:15 /usr/bin/gem1.8
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 701 Nov 19 2007 /usr/bin/gem
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 545 Jul 28 00:15 /usr/bin/gem1.8
Yes. This is what we get for upgrading gem without using Ubuntu’s package system. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound:
sudo mv /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
Done. Now to install Haml and Sass….
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