Gem install hangs indefinitely

Question

Background: I'm a designer that works well with HTML, CSS, and JS. But when it comes to setting up my environment is where I fall short.

I recently purchased a home computer. I want to set up Middleman to use in a project. I already installed rvm and all its requirements. I am on ruby-2.0.0-p0, which from what I understand is the latest stable release.

When I attempt to install Middleman, or any other gem for that matter, nothing happens. The cursor just moves to the next line.

Some guidance, or troubleshooting steps, would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

Ricardo

Answer 1

If gem install is hanging, it's most likely a network, proxy, or firewall issue on your end.

You can investigate by issuing your gem install command in verbose mode with -V. It'll show you what URLs it's communicating with to download the gem, and you can hopefully see what it's doing and where it's hanging:

> gem install -V middleman HEAD https://rubygems.org/latest_specs.4.8.gz 302 Moved Temporarily HEAD https://s3.amazonaws.com/production.s3.rubygems.org/latest_specs.4.8.gz 200 OK GET https://rubygems.org/latest_specs.4.8.gz 302 Moved Temporarily GET https://s3.amazonaws.com/production.s3.rubygems.org/latest_specs.4.8.gz ... 

You can also check status.rubygems.org where they'll alert you in case the gem/spec servers do have problems (see screenshot below):