gem install rails doesn't do anything

Question

I installed Ruby and RubyGems on Ubuntu 10.04. Ruby is version 1.8.7. Gems is version 1.3.7. When I try sudo gem install rails, nothing happens. It just hangs forever. What am I missing? Thanks!

score 170 · Answer 1 · answered May 11 '11 at 14:06

170

Try adding -V (upper case) to the end of the install command, if forces the command to be verbose, so you can see things going on. Eg:

sudo gem install rails -V

answered May 11 '11 at 14:06

Matt Bearman

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Another thing to consider... open Task Manager (or equivalent - I'm using Xubuntu) and view process by CPU usage. That's the only indication I had that gem was actually doing anything until it eventually finished. – nathanchere Aug 04 '11 at 05:57
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It was using so little CPU that I still didn't think it was doing anything. I tried `-v` but that didn't work - had to be uppercase! – cwd Feb 11 '13 at 15:37
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seriously thank you, thought my gems was broken – Jessie Frazelle Aug 06 '13 at 21:39
That's what I am looking for! – Frank Fang Mar 30 '14 at 04:36
Wow. At least they could have echoed something, well _anything_, to the console. I just assumed that I had to run as root or something similar. – Magnilex Mar 24 '15 at 19:16
`-V` was very helpful. I had a conflict for the rails binary, where it asked to overwrite `y/n` (expecting an action). But without `-V` it wouldn't even display that message and it just hangs as a result of this. – Peter Ilfrich Apr 08 '15 at 02:28

score 59 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 18 '10 at 23:35

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It'll take quite some time to install rails - there are lot of dependencies and these need to be downloaded - if you have a slow connection, just wait for a bit.

answered Sep 18 '10 at 23:35

Sathyajith Bhat

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Thanks! I guess I was expecting an immediate response of some kind like with apt-get. – bsamek Sep 18 '10 at 23:48
I was on the same boat as you - thought it had given up but it was processing in the background. – Sathyajith Bhat Sep 18 '10 at 23:54
I have a lightning fast connection on a VPS server and this is still happening – boulder_ruby Sep 24 '15 at 19:43

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited May 02 '15 at 09:28

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try to add -V (upper-case) in the parameter, to show more detail of what is downloading
if it still very slow or pending somewhere, it normally indicates a low internet connection to the rubygems.org site(showing in the output window). you can try to update the source of the gem using, by

gem source -r https://rubygems.org/

gem source -a "your new source site"

in my country, after I switch to http://ruby.taobao.org, it only takes 1min to complete the installation.

edited May 02 '15 at 09:28

vivi

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answered Feb 22 '14 at 02:46

Bryan Liu

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First option is better than just waiting for an empty line to show something – Ali Almoullim Apr 12 '15 at 19:45

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 11 '18 at 20:21

In addition to monitoring with the -V flag, it's also worth checking that you can pull anything from the internet first. If you're not sure (new server, for example), try wget -O/dev/null https://rubygems.org/ and see if there is trouble retrieving the source site.

gem install rails doesn't do anything

4 Answers4