I’m just posting a simple tip today.

I was wanting to play around with the very cool SASS meta-language using Compass. The language and tool are implemented in Ruby, which is pre-installed on OS X, but as I discovered, I needed a newer version of RubyGems.

I had already known I needed to update Gems, so I was doing the following:

$ sudo gem update

Eventually I got errors like this:

Updating installed gems...
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.github.com/
Attempting remote update of RedCloth
ERROR:  Error installing RedCloth:
    RedCloth requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of capistrano
ERROR:  Error installing capistrano:
    capistrano requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of net-sftp
ERROR:  Error installing net-sftp:
    net-sftp requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of net-ssh
ERROR:  Error installing net-ssh:
    net-ssh requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Gems updated: RedCloth, capistrano, net-sftp, net-ssh

Turns out, to update RubyGems, one must update the gem system!

So, the next correct command to run is:

$ sudo gem update --system

This updated my RubyGems to version 1.3.1 and allowed me to move forward in playing with Ruby.