Permission denied error with RVM

Question

I have searched for this problem and couldn't find relevant similar questions. Please bear with me if this is repetitive.

I have followed guides in RVM website to install RVM and I have installed rubies:

syed@rails:~$ rvm list

rvm rubies

   ruby-1.8.7-p302 [ i386 ]
=> ruby-1.9.2-p0 [ i386 ]

As you can see I have made ruby-1.9.2 my default.

This is my gem directory:

syed@rails:~$ rvm gemdir
/home/syed/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0

Now, I tried to install rails and I am thrown the following error:

syed@rails:~$ gem install rails
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Errno::EACCES)
    Permission denied - /home/syed/.gem/specs

I even did this without making any difference to the error:

syed@rails:~$ chown -R syed /home/syed/.rvm/

Currently, my environment looks like this:

syed@rails:~$ gem environment
RubyGems Environment:
  - RUBYGEMS VERSION: 1.3.7
  - RUBY VERSION: 1.9.2 (2010-08-18 patchlevel 0) [i686-linux]
  - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /home/syed/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3
  - RUBY EXECUTABLE: /home/syed/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p0/bin/ruby
  - EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: /home/syed/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/bin
  - RUBYGEMS PLATFORMS:
    - ruby
    - x86-linux
  - GEM PATHS:
     - /home/syed/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3
     - /home/syed/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@global
  - GEM CONFIGURATION:
     - :update_sources => true
     - :verbose => true
     - :benchmark => false
     - :backtrace => false
     - :bulk_threshold => 1000
  - REMOTE SOURCES:
     - http://rubygems.org/

I don't understand why it is trying to install gems to my system gem directory path?

Answer 1

I had this same problem and I resolved it by doing the following:

sudo mkdir ~/.gem/specs
sudo chmod 777 ~/.gem/specs

It seems that RVM was trying to create this "specs" folder, but didn't have permissions to do so.