Copy Ruby Gems Between Ruby Installations/Computers/Systems
Surprising this isn’t better Google-documented. Here’s how I do it.
Make a list of your existing gems in a text file (run from machine with gems already installed):
gem list | tail -n+4 | awk '{print $1}' > gemlist
Copy the file to your new system. Make sure your new system has the packages installed that will be needed to build your gems (such as ruby1.8, ruby1.8-dev, rubygems1.8). Then run:
cat gemlist | xargs sudo gem install
It’s run through each line of your gemlist file and run sudo gem install on it. If you don’t sudo install your gems, you can remove that bit about sudo.
Or if you want to go for the gold with a single command line:
ssh -o 'StrictHostKeyChecking=no' #{gem_server} #{path_to_gem} list | tail -n+1 | awk '{print $1 $2}' | sed 's/(/ --version /' | sed 's/)//' | tail -n+3 | xargs -n 3 #{path_to_gem} install
After installing REE 1.8.7, I used a slight permutation of this to install my gems with Ruby 1.8.7 from their previous Ruby 1.8.6 installation (previous gem install was accessible as “gem”, REE 1.8.7 gem accessible as “/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-20090928/bin/gem”):
gem list | tail -n+1 | awk '{print $1 $2}' | sed 's/(/ --version /' | sed 's/)//' | tail -n+3 | xargs -n 3 /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-20090928/bin/gem install
That reinstalled all my existing gems with the REE 1.8.7 gem manager.
Cool, I am going to try this for macports when I upgrade to snow leopard, too!
Thanks for this, I just adapted the sed command to remove trailing comma: sed ’s/(/ –version /’ | sed ’s/,//’ | sed ’s/)//’