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More of the “why” and “wtf” than “how”.

The RubyGems development team has gotten a lot of support requests over the years, and this is a list of the questions users both new and old that frequently pop up.

We also answer questions on Bundler.io Slack. Some of the information you can find on the support site includes:

I installed gems with --user-install and their commands are not available

When you use the --user-install option, RubyGems will install the gems to a directory inside your home directory, something like ~/.gem/ruby/1.9.1. The commands provided by the gems you installed will end up in ~/.gem/ruby/1.9.1/bin. For the programs installed there to be available for you, you need to add ~/.gem/ruby/1.9.1/bin to your PATH environment variable.

For example, if you use bash you can add that directory to your PATH by adding code like this to your ~/.bashrc file:

if which ruby >/dev/null && which gem >/dev/null; then
    PATH="$(ruby -r rubygems -e 'puts Gem.user_dir')/bin:$PATH"
fi

After adding this code to your ~/.bashrc, you need to restart your shell for the changes to take effect. You can do this by opening a new terminal window or by running exec $SHELL in the window you already have open.

How can I trust Gem code that’s automatically downloaded?

The same way you can trust any other code you install from the net: ultimately, you can’t. You are responsible for knowing the source of the gems that you are using. In a setting where security is critical, you should only use known-good gems, and possibly perform your own security audit on the gem code.

The Ruby community is discussing ways to make gem code more secure in the future, using some public-key infrastructure. To see the progress of this discussion, visit the rubygems-trust organization on GitHub.

Why does require 'some-gem' fail?

Not every library has a strict mapping between the name of the gem and the name of the file you need to require. First you should check to see if the files match correctly:

$ gem list RedCloth

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

RedCloth (4.1.1)
$ ruby -e 'require "RedCloth"'
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require': no such file to load -- RedCloth (LoadError)
  from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
  from -e:1
$ gem contents --no-prefix RedCloth | grep lib
lib/case_sensitive_require/RedCloth.rb
lib/redcloth/erb_extension.rb
lib/redcloth/formatters/base.rb
lib/redcloth/formatters/html.rb
lib/redcloth/formatters/latex.rb
lib/redcloth/formatters/latex_entities.yml
lib/redcloth/textile_doc.rb
lib/redcloth/version.rb
lib/redcloth.rb
$ ruby -e 'require "redcloth"'
$ # success!

If you’re requiring the correct file, maybe gem is using a different ruby than ruby:

$ which ruby
/usr/local/bin/ruby
$ gem env | grep 'RUBY EXECUTABLE'
   - RUBY EXECUTABLE: /usr/local/bin/ruby1.9

In this instance we’ve got two ruby installations so that gem uses a different version than ruby. You can probably fix this by adjusting a symlink:

$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/ruby*
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel       76 Jan 20  2010 /usr/local/bin/ruby@ -> /usr/local/bin/ruby1.8
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1213160 Jul 15 16:36 /usr/local/bin/ruby1.8*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  2698624 Jul  6 19:30 /usr/local/bin/ruby1.9*
$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/gem*
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   76 Jan 20  2010 /usr/local/bin/gem@ -> /usr/local/bin/gem1.9
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  550 Jul 15 16:36 /usr/local/bin/gem1.8*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  550 Jul  6 19:30 /usr/local/bin/gem1.9*

You may also need to give irb the same treatment.

Why does require return false when loading a file from a gem?

Require returns false when loading a file from a gem. Usually require will return true when it has loaded correctly. What’s wrong?

Nothing’s wrong. Well, something. But nothing you need to worry about.

A false return from the require method does not indicate an error. It just means that the file has already been loaded.

RubyGems has a feature that allows a file to be automatically loaded when a gem is activated (i.e. selected). When you require a file that is in an inactive gem, the RubyGems software will activate that gem for you. During that activation, any autoloaded files will be loaded for you.

So, by the time your require statement actually does the work of loading the file, it has already been autoloaded via the gem activation, and therefore the statement returns false.

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