Uninstall Old Versions of Ruby Gems

For removing older versions of all installed gems, following 2 commands are useful:

 gem cleanup --dryrun

Above command will preview what gems are going to be removed.

 gem cleanup

Above command will actually remove them.

Way to clean out any old versions of gems.

sudo gem cleanup

If you just want to see a list of what would be removed you can use:

sudo gem cleanup -d

You can also cleanup just a specific gem by specifying its name:

sudo gem cleanup gemname

for remove specific version like 1.1.9 only

gem uninstall gemname --version 1.1.9

If you still facing some exception to install gem, like:

invalid gem: package is corrupt, exception while verifying: undefined method `size' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError) in /home/rails/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.1@project/cache/nokogiri-1.6.6.2.gem

the, you can remove it from cache:

rm /home/rails/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.1@project/cache/nokogiri-1.6.6.2.gem

For more detail:

Try something like gem uninstall rjb --version 1.3.4.

gem cleanup uses system commands. Installed gems are just directories in the filesystem. If you want to batch delete, use rm -R.

1. gem environment and note the value of GEM PATHS
2. cd <your-gem-paths>/gems
3. ls -1 |grep rjb- |xargs rm -R

You might need to set GEM_HOME for the cleanup to work. You can check what paths exist for gemfiles by running:

gem env

Take note of the GEM PATHS section.

In my case, for example, with gems installed in my user home:

export GEM_HOME="~/.gem/ruby/2.4.0"
gem cleanup

bundler clean

Stopped the message showing for me, as a last step after I tried all of the above.