How do I remove Permission denied @ rb_sysopen - Gem install error?

Question

I am trying to install create a new app in Ruby on Rails and I cannot get passed this error:

$ gem install pg 

ERROR: While executing gem ... (Errno::EACCES) Permission denied @ rb_sysopen - /Users/stormyramsey/.rbenv/versions/2.3.2/lib/ruby/gems/2.3.0/gems/pg-0.21.0/.gemtest

Answer 1

Its a permissions issue. You could fix it with this:

sudo chown -R $(whoami) /Library/Ruby/Gems/* 

or possibly in your case

sudo chown -R $(whoami) /Users/stormyramsey/.rbenv/versions/2.3.2/lib/ruby/gems/* 

What does this do:

This is telling the system to change the files to change the ownership to the current user. Something must have gotten messed up when something got installed. Usually this is because there are multiple accounts or users are using sudo to install when they should not always have to.

Answer 2

It's likely there's a permissions problem somewhere along the .rbenv path. You might try turning on write privileges for your user with:

$ chmod -R +w ~/.rbenv 

That will recursively (-R) change the file mode (chmod) to write permission (+w) for all files and directories under your user's .rbenv path. There's no particular reason for not having files set to write.