how to install gems without sudo

Question

On all my gem installs I have to do sudo ? So

sudo gem install rails

will work, while only

gem install rails

will not work. How do I remedy it ?

I have rvm installed -

murtaza@murtaza-dev:~$ which rvm /home/murtaza/.rvm/bin/rvm  murtaza@murtaza-dev:~$ which gem /home/murtaza/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/gem 

However I am also getting this warning when I do any operations with gem -

murtaza@murtaza-dev:~$ gem /home/murtaza/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/gem:4: warning: Insecure world writable dir /opt in PATH, mode 040777 

EDIT

I have reinstalled rvm using curl -L get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --auto (without sudo).

However still when I try installing gem it gives me the following error -

murtaza@murtaza-dev:~$ gem install rails /home/murtaza/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/gem:4: warning: Insecure world writable dir /opt in PATH, mode 040777 ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Errno::EACCES)     Permission denied - /home/murtaza/.gem/specs 

EDIT

I did chown on the whole thing but still getting the error -

murtaza@murtaza-dev:~$ sudo chown murtaza.murtaza -R ~/.rvm/*    murtaza@murtaza-dev:~$ gem install rails     /home/murtaza/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/gem:4: warning: Insecure world writable dir /opt in PATH, mode 040777     ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Errno::EACCES)         Permission denied - /home/murtaza/.gem/specs 

Answer 1

Use chown on the whole .rvm and .gem directories back to your user. You probably used sudo before and it screwed up permissions.

sudo chown -R username:group ~/.rvm sudo chown -R username:group ~/.gem 

Of course, change username to your username and group to your group

Answer 2

When you install them without sudo, Ruby doesn't know where they get installed to. I can't remember where it installs them by default, probably somewhere like ~/.gems or something. Anyway, you can tell Ruby that's where they're installed by setting the GEM_HOME environment variable.

$ # assuming your gems are stored in ~/.gems $ GEM_HOME="$HOME/.gems" ruby my_program.rb 

If that works, then you might put it in your ~/.bashrc (there are a number of possible files this could go in, depending on your system)