Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

Ruby Installing Rails on Mac

Sarah Eichenstein
Sarah Eichenstein
7,488 Points
Posted by Sarah Eichenstein
Sarah Eichenstein
7,488 Points

I'm getting a Gem: :FilePermissionError when I try to install rails on my terminal. 

Sarahs-MBP:~ sarahyiskah$ gem install rails --version 5.0.0
Fetching: i18n-0.8.1.gem (100%)
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
    You don't have write permissions for the /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0 directory.

so then I tried to switch to sudo and I'm getting an "illegal username"

Sarahs-MBP:~ sarahyiskah$ sudo chown -R Sarah ~/.rbenv
Password:
chown: Sarah: illegal user name

1 Answer

Jay McGavren
STAFF
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher
Jay McGavren
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher

Sarah Eichenstein You're getting these errors because the gem command is attempting to install to the /Library/Ruby directory, which needs special permissions to write to. That's an indication that RVM is not installed, or is not set up correctly.

The video recommends installing and using RVM, which will avoid this sort of issue. The relevant directions begin at 02'15". Can you review those and confirm that you've followed all the steps to set up RVM?

Sarah Eichenstein
Sarah Eichenstein
7,488 Points
Sarah Eichenstein
Sarah Eichenstein
7,488 Points

I updated the version of Ruby I have installed and then it all started working. Thank you :)