Written by Matt Gauger
on October 31, 2010

/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:779:in `report_activate_error': Could not find RubyGem railties (>= 0) (Gem::LoadError)

I tend to blog things that I want to remember, but couldn’t find in one quick Google search.

This is an error I got while starting the Rails Tutorial, because I was using an old system (I counted about 160 gems installed) and starting to use rvm for managing my Ruby installs, because the Rails Tutorial recommends it. I haven’t had this kind of issue before, because rails, gem, and ruby commands have all just worked out-of-the-box for me since Mac OS X 10.5 was released.

When I tried to create a new Rails app, I got the error in the title of the blog post:

minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ rails new first_app
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:779:in `report_activate_error': Could not find RubyGem railties (>= 0) (Gem::LoadError)
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:214:in `activate'
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:1082:in `gem'
        from /usr/bin/rails:18
minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ rails -v
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:779:in `report_activate_error': Could not find RubyGem railties (>= 0) (Gem::LoadError)
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:214:in `activate'
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:1082:in `gem'
        from /usr/bin/rails:18

That didn’t make sense. Where is the Rails command being run from?

```minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ which ruby /Users/mathiasx/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p0/bin/ruby minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ which gem /Users/mathiasx/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p0/bin/gem minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ which rails /usr/bin/rails

Aha. Obviously the previously-installed Rails gem, from before installing rvm, was an issue. So I figured I'd just clean it up.

minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ rvm list

rvm rubies

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

minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ rvm use 1.8.7 Using /Users/mathiasx/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p302 minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ sudo gem uninstall rails Remove executables: rails

in addition to the gem? [Yn] y Removing rails Successfully uninstalled rails-3.0.1 minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ which rails /usr/bin/rails

But I hadn't been paying attention. I still had not removed the Rails executable, because I was calling the rvm version of Ruby 1.8.7 and not the system-level one. Knowing that Rails was in `/usr/bin/rails`, I assumed that the gem executable that managed it would also be in `/usr/bin`:

minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ sudo /usr/bin/gem uninstall rails Remove executables: rails

in addition to the gem? [Yn] y Removing rails

You have requested to uninstall the gem: rails-3.0.0 clearance-0.9.0.rc9 depends on [rails (~> 3.0.0)] factory_girl_rails-1.0 depends on [rails (>= 3.0.0.beta4)] suspenders-0.1.0.beta.4 depends on [rails (>= 3.0.0)] If you remove this gems, one or more dependencies will not be met. Continue with Uninstall? [Yn] y Successfully uninstalled rails-3.0.0

I'd finally removed the system-level Rails script and can switch back to using rvm for everything:

minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ rvm use 1.9.2 Using /Users/mathiasx/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0 minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ which rails /Users/mathiasx/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0/bin/rails Using /Users/mathiasx/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0 minimite:railstutorial.org mathiasx$ rails new first_app create <– Lots of output –> ```

It works!

Lesson learned: Always pay attention. The answer is probably sitting right in front of you.

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