'sudo gem install' or 'gem install'

Question

Running 'sudo gem list --local' and 'gem list --local' give me differing results. My gem path is set to my home folder and only contains the gems from 'gem list --local'.

It's probably not good to have gems installed in different directories on my computer, so should I have the gem path set differently, and should I always use sudo when installing something?

my ~/.profile
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"

~/.bash_profile is empty.

Answer 1

You can also install gems in your local environment (without sudo) with

gem install --user-install <gemname>

I recommend that so you don't mess with your system-level configuration even if it's a single-user computer.

You can check where the gems go by looking at gempaths with gem environment. In my case it's "~/.gem/ruby/1.8".

If you need some binaries from local installs added to your path, you can add something to your bashrc like:

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

(from http://guides.rubygems.org/faqs/#user-install)