never use sudo gem install again
It always bothered me that when you do a gem install instead of a sudo gem install you usually get the following errors:
WARNING: Installing to ~/.gem since /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 and
/usr/local/bin aren't both writable.
WARNING: You don't have /Users/martijn/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin in your PATH,
gem executables will not run.
Most of the times, gems are all over the place. I just want them all to be in one place - ~/.gem - and I don’t want to type sudo gem install … again. And, most of all, I don’t want to see those annoying warnings when I type gem install …
Getting rid of the second warning is easy, just type
export PATH="$HOME/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin:$PATH"
To get rid of the first warning, put
:gemhome: /Users/{your_username}/.gem/ruby/1.8/
in the ~/.gemrc file.
All your gems will now be in ~/.gem/ and you’ll no longer see those annoying warnings when you do a gem install. YES!
–== UPDATE ==–
Apparently, instead of editing ~/.gemrc you can also type:
export GEM_PATH="$HOME/.gem/ruby/1.8"
export GEM_HOME="$HOME/.gem/ruby/1.8"
Thanks to Pat Allan, who wrote about it here
[...] If you just don’t like using sudo, here’s a good article on that: http://dev.innovationfactory.nl/2009/10/26/never-use-sudo-gem-install-again/. [...]