Bundler cannot install any gems without sudo

Question

I'm trying to install a rails app and every time I use bundle it fails without sudo. My current situation is that everything works as long as use sudo for everything, including rails. I don't think this is correct.

For example:

$ bundle update Updating git://github.com/refinery/refinerycms.git Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/....... Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/.. Resolving dependencies... Enter your password to install the bundled RubyGems to your system:  Using rake (10.0.4)  Using i18n (0.6.1)  Using multi_json (1.7.2)  Using rack-cache (1.2)  Using rack-test (0.6.2)  Installing hike (1.2.2)  Errno::EACCES: Permission denied - /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/build_info/hike-1.2.2.info An error occurred while installing hike (1.2.2), and Bundler cannot continue. Make sure that `gem install hike -v '1.2.2'` succeeds before bundling. 

But then I do what it says and it works:

$ gem install hike -v '1.2.2'  Successfully installed hike-1.2.2 Parsing documentation for hike-1.2.2 Installing ri documentation for hike-1.2.2 Done installing documentation for hike after 0 seconds 1 gem installed 

This pattern repeats again and again for different gems. I don't get it. Why is this happening? If I use sudo bundle will update without this error. But the current situation is that I need sudo for everything, including rake... or rails server, etc. Something isn't right.

Additional details: I'm on OSX 10.8.3...

$ ruby -v ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-darwin11.4.0] $ gem -v 2.0.3 $ rvm -v rvm 1.19.6 (stable) by Wayne E. Seguin <[email protected]>, Michal Papis <[email protected]> [https://rvm.io/]  $ which ruby /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/ruby $ which gem /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/gem $ which rvm /usr/local/rvm/bin/rvm 

Update

It may be informative that I can run sudo bundle install with no errors. Then immediately after bundle install fails with an error like you see above. Why is this?

Update2

/usr/local/rvm[master]$ ls -l total 56 -rw-rw-r--   1 root  rvm   566 May  4 12:59 LICENCE -rw-rw-r--   1 root  rvm  8929 May  4 12:59 README -rw-rw-r--   1 root  rvm     7 May  4 12:59 RELEASE -rw-rw-r--   1 root  rvm     7 May  4 12:59 VERSION drwxrwsr-x   3 root  rvm   102 May  4 01:34 archives drwxrwsr-x  35 root  rvm  1190 May  4 12:59 bin drwxrwsr-x  11 root  rvm   374 May  4 12:59 config drwxrwsr-x   6 root  rvm   204 Jan 10 19:55 contrib drwxrwsr-x   5 root  rvm   170 Jan 10 19:55 environments drwxrwsr-x   3 root  rvm   102 Jan 10 19:55 examples drwxrwsr-x   5 root  rvm   170 Jan 10 19:52 gems drwxrwxr-x   6 ESL   rvm   204 May  4 12:59 gemsets drwxrwsr-x  92 root  rvm  3128 May  4 01:34 help drwxrwsr-x  11 root  rvm   374 May  4 01:34 hooks -rw-rw-r--   1 root  rvm    11 May  4 12:59 installed.at drwxrwsr-x   4 root  rvm   136 Jan 10 19:54 lib drwxrwsr-x   5 root  rvm   170 May  4 12:55 log drwxrwsr-x   2 root  rvm    68 Jan 10 19:52 man drwxrwsr-x   9 root  rvm   306 Jan 10 19:52 patches drwxrwxr-x   4 ESL   rvm   136 May  4 12:59 patchsets drwxrwsr-x   4 root  rvm   136 Jan 10 19:55 rubies drwxrwsr-x  64 root  rvm  2176 May  4 01:34 scripts drwxrwsr-x   3 root  rvm   102 May  4 01:34 src drwxrwsr-x   2 root  rvm    68 Jan 10 19:52 tmp drwxrwsr-x   8 root  rvm   272 May  4 12:59 user drwxrwsr-x   4 root  rvm   136 Jan 10 19:52 usr drwxrwsr-x   5 root  rvm   170 Jan 10 19:55 wrappers 

Answer 1

You may host gems in your user home folder, that does not need root permissions:

bundle install --path ~/.gem

To avoid passing this parameter manually add export GEM_HOME=$HOME/.gem to your .bash_profile -- this solves sudo issue on Mac OS and other *nix systems. You then also might need to have access to gems that provide executables (such as bundler), so add this too:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.gem/bin 

or in some cases:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.gem/ruby/<version>/bin 

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ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5862327/322020

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UPD: But keep in mind that if you start using rbenv having this environment variable be the same might cause problems when using too different versions of Ruby, so you might want to temporary unset GEM_HOME or prepend custom one each time you launch rbenv-ed Ruby.