Railties's executable "rails" conflicts with /usr/bin/rails

Question

I'm trying to install rails using the command sudo gem install rails however, when i do so i get the following error message:

 railties's executable "rails" conflicts with /usr/bin/rails
 Overwrite the executable? [yN]

I do not currently have rails installed and i'm not looking to install RVM or rbenv, although i will likely do so at a later date.

N.B. Rails is not currently installed

Can someone advise what i should do?

Thanks

Answer 1

I came across this issue just now when installing Rails on my MacBook. I opened the /usr/bin/ directory and opened the "rails" file in a text editor. Here's the result.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# Stub rails command to load rails from Gems or print an error if not installed.
require 'rubygems'

version = ">= 0"
if ARGV.first =~ /^_(.*)_$/ and Gem::Version.correct? $1 then
  version = $1
  ARGV.shift
end

begin
  gem 'railties', version or raise
rescue Exception
  puts 'Rails is not currently installed on this system. To get the latest version, simply type:'
  puts
  puts '    $ sudo gem install rails'
  puts
  puts 'You can then rerun your "rails" command.'
  exit 0
end

load Gem.bin_path('railties', 'rails', version)

I figure it's safe to let the gem installer override this stub, but now it's more of a personal preference. I try to avoid modifying any "core" files whenever possible.

After a quick Google search, I came across this promising article and will be using it for my install.
Ruby on Rails development setup for Mac OSX

Cheers!