为什么在Ubuntu上安装Rails gem会引发Zlib :: GzipFile :: Error？

Question

Here is what I'm doing

sudo gem install rails
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Zlib::GzipFile::Error)
    unexpected end of file
alex@ubuntu:~/Documents/$ sudo gem fetch -V rails
GET http://rubygems.org/latest_specs.4.8.gz
302 Moved Temporarily
GET http://production.s3.rubygems.org/latest_specs.4.8.gz
200 OK
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Zlib::GzipFile::Error)
    unexpected end of file

I googled on this but didn't find anything valuable. I even installed

sudo apt-get install libzlib-ruby

and I was able to install rake this way

gem install rake

The odd thing is that if I say just gem install rails then nothing happens at all.

gem sources
*** CURRENT SOURCES ***

https://rubygems.org/

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Don't Do That

Installing system gems on Debian-based systems is a bad idea. Don't do that. Either use the system packages, or use a Ruby environment-management tool like rvm or rbenv .

Using System Packages

Depending on your version of Ubuntu, use:

# Rails 2.3 on Ubuntu 12.10
sudo apt-get install rails

# Rails 3.2 on Ubuntu 12.10
sudo apt-get install rails3

or find available Rails metapackages for your version with apt-cache search .

Install rbenv On Ubuntu 12.10

If you're using Ubuntu 12.10, you can install rbenv and ruby-build as system packages, too. For example:

sudo apt-get install --install-suggests rbenv ruby-build