Created a workspace, tried installing money gem but I keep getting FilePermissionError

Hi!

The issue here is that we do a system installation of Ruby inside of a workspace, which means a "gem install" tries to write to a directory that the unprivileged treehouse user doesn't have access to.

I strongly encourage folks to not chmod system directories to work around this as some previous posters described. Instead, just install gems to a location your user already has access to. This is controlled via the GEM_HOME environment variable. So to follow along to Jason's video:

# make the directory to save our gems
treehouse:~/workspace$ mkdir -p ~/.local/gems

# export the GEM_HOME environment variable                   
treehouse:~/workspace$ export GEM_HOME=~/.local/gems

Now gem installation should work:

treehouse:~/workspace$ gem install money                                              
Fetching: i18n-0.7.0.gem (100%)                                                       
Successfully installed i18n-0.7.0                                                     
Fetching: money-6.6.1.gem (100%)                                                      
...                    
2 gems installed 

And you can use them:

treehouse:~/workspace$ irb                                            
irb(main):001:0> require 'money'                                                      
=> true 

We're going to fix this on our end, but in the meantime you'll need to do this manually when you launch Ruby workspaces until we can get that shipped.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

I tried using workspaces as well (oh great, can't copy/paste so I have to type the error manually):

Fetching: i18n-0.7.0.gem (100%)
ERROR: While executing gem . . . (Gem::FilePermissionError)
     You don't have write permissions for the /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.1.0 directory.

So I assume Jason has administrator privileges and we don't, there's not much reason to emulate what he's doing.

You are right, I tried this myself and I got the same issue. It looks like the workspaces commandline doesn't give us any admin privileges. What I would do instead is install ruby on your local machine. Follow this guide depending on which operating system you have. I also had to add the ruby directory to my system path, so I could the commands like 'ruby' and 'gem' without having to use the full path. (follow these instructions if you are on Windows. Add the following to your system path ;C:\Ruby22\bin)

Let me know if you have any trouble with this.

Cheers,

Hi Garrett. I downloaded Ruby 6.6.1 and edited my system path as you suggested but when I try to use the Ruby program, I just get a pop-up message saying there's no program associated with it. Thanks all the same and I'm open to other ideas.

Hi Ben. Thank you for your response. I'd better link you to this thread which I think will offer a way around for non-Ubuntu users.

https://teamtreehouse.com/community/filepermissionerror

I think that Jason was using Ubuntu when he wrote this course and that he didn't take into consideration the fact that not everyone uses Ubuntu. He might have assumed it would work on all platforms, with all operating systems.

This should help: chmod 777 -R /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems

Type it in before installing the gem. It worked for me and hopefully it will for everyone else. Credit and thanks to Seth Reece for coming up with this.

This code will be what you people are looking for:

gem install money

Can't say for certain without seeing command line output, but be sure you are in the correct directory before installing the gem.

Are you using workspaces? I am not sure if this helps but try using:

sudo gem install money