Regarding ruby-install extension like ruby-removal to letgo old rubies installations

[thapakazi]

I was recently bundling lots of ruby-projects and got stumbled upon low-disk space problem, and after few serlock inspections, found out i was carrying multiplle old version of rubies:

➜  ~  chruby
   jruby-1.7.13
   ruby-1.9.3-p547
   ruby-2.1.2
   ruby-2.1.4
   ruby-2.1.5
   ruby-2.2.0
   ruby-2.2.1
   ruby-2.2.2
   ruby-2.2.3
 * ruby-2.3.0

Since I switched to chruby+ ruby-install from giant: rvm never had a single hunch that it was a wrong choice. But I wish there exists some installed ruby removal version of ruby-install :thought_balloon: . For now I am writing/using my own version of shell function to clean the old ones I no longer use.

[postmodern]

I plan on adding a ruby-uninstall command. It should cd back into the ruby's src dir and run make uninstall or rake uninstall, if available.

[thapakazi]

nice one @postmodern, if availabe :( Most of time I clean up the ruby src/* files used for installation, :no_good:

[mvz]

I usually just remove the whole installation directory for old ruby versions. Not sure if that works for system installations, though.

[FranklinYu]

Isn't it just

rm -rf ~/.rubies/ruby-2.2.0

or am I missing anything?

[mvz]

@franklinyu that's what I use, but AIUI you can make ruby-install do a system installation and then it may be harder.

[FranklinYu]

@mvz Oh, because the files scatter everywhere? (Sorry I never tried messing with system Ruby.)

[ILMostro]

@FranklinYu that's what I use, but AIUI you can make ruby-install do a system installation and then it may be harder.

Kind of defeats the purpose of using ruby-install, doesn't it? Although, I'm not sure what the purpose of the --system option is, besides installing the specified ruby version into the /usr/local/ directory. If that's all, then this could be removed altogether in favor of using the --rubies-dir option; anyone still wanting to deal with the headache of mixing system-wide tools and libraries with those provided by ruby-install can spend time trying to clean up when they try to uninstall a version that's no longer needed. This is a bad practice, in general. Implementing an "uninstall" option should not be hindered by attempting to solve problems that stem from bad practices, ill-advised or non-standard use, IMHO.
As it stands, it should be easy enough to implement this via an --uninstall option, which could at least run make uninstall in the source directory and print a message about manually cleaning up the ~/.gems/ directory and/or .rubies directory.

[lacostenycoder]

I ran ruby-install --system ruby 2.7.7 and now need to revert to the previous version. But I think I borked it. The server I'm using had update-alternatives selecting the ruby version from a 2.5 to a 2.6 and was set to 2.6. I need to return things to this state, but not sure how to go about it without blowing up the server. Can anyone help with this please?

[postmodern]

@lacostenycoder cd into /usr/local/src/ruby-2.7.7 and run sudo make uninstall. That should remove the files installed into /usr/local. I eventually plan on adding a ruby-uninstall command that can safely remove installed rubies.