[rubygems] You don't have write permissions for the /var/lib/gems/2.3.0 directory

I have ruby installed on my ubuntu 16.04.

$which ruby  

/usr/bin/ruby

$ruby -v 

ruby 2.3.0p0 (2015-12-25) [x86_64-linux-gnu]

$gem install bundler 

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
    You don't have write permissions for the /var/lib/gems/2.3.0 directory.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Building on derek's answer above, it is generally not recommended to use the system provided Ruby instance for your own development work, as system tools might depend on the particular version or location of the Ruby install. Similar to this answer for Mac OSX, you will want to follow derek's instructions on using something like rbenv (RVM is a similar alternative) to install your own Ruby instance.

However, there is no need to uninstall the system version of Ruby, the rbenv installation instructions provide a mechanism to make sure that the instance of Ruby available in your shell is the rbenv instance, not the system instance. This is the

echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc

line in derek's answer.

If you want to use the distribution Ruby instead of rb-env/rvm, you can set up a GEM_HOME for your current user. Start by creating a directory to store the Ruby gems for your user:

$ mkdir ~/.ruby

Then update your shell to use that directory for GEM_HOME and to update your PATH variable to include the Ruby gem bin directory.

$ echo 'export GEM_HOME=~/.ruby/' >> ~/.bashrc
$ echo 'export PATH="$PATH:~/.ruby/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.bashrc

(That last line will reload the environment variables in your current shell.)

Now you should be able to install Ruby gems under your user using the gem command. I was able to get this working with Ruby 2.5.1 under Ubuntu 18.04. If you are using a shell that is not Bash, then you will need to edit the startup script for that shell instead of bashrc.

Rather than changing owners, which might lock out other local users, or –some day– your own ruby server/deployment-things... running under a different user...

I would rather simply extend rights of that particular folder to... well, everybody:

cd /var/lib
sudo chmod -R a+w gems/

(I did encounter your error as well. So this is fairly verified.)

Ubuntu 20.04:

Option 1 - set up a gem installation directory for your user account

For bash (for zsh, we would use .zshrc of course)

echo '# Install Ruby Gems to ~/gems' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export GEM_HOME="$HOME/gems"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Option 2 - use snap

Uninstall the apt-version (ruby-full) and reinstall it with snap

sudo apt-get remove ruby
sudo snap install ruby --classic

Try using chown -R on the var/lib/gems directory, assigning ownership to the user [rubyusername] in this example, the user that will be installing and developing with gems.

 # chown -R rubyusername:rubyusername /var/lib/gems 

This recursively changes everything under the gems directory. For extra security on multi-user systems, you can also create a group, rather than chowning the individual rubyusername, and add users to that group.

I encountered the same error in GitHub Actions. Adding sudo solved the issue.

sudo gem install bundler

(January 2019) To install Ruby using the Rbenv script, follow these steps:

1. First, update the packages index and install the packages required for the ruby-build tool to build Ruby from source:

sudo apt-get remove ruby
sudo apt update
sudo apt install git curl libssl-dev libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev autoconf bison build-essential libyaml-dev libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev libffi-dev libgdbm-dev

2. Next, run the following curl command to install both rbenv and ruby-build:

curl -sL https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv-installer/raw/master/bin/rbenv-installer | bash -

3. Add $HOME/.rbenv/bin to the system PATH.

If you are using Bash, run:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

If you are using Zsh run:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

4. Install the latest stable version of Ruby and set it as a default version with:

rbenv install 2.5.1
rbenv global 2.5.1

To list all available Ruby versions you can use: rbenv install -l

5. Verify that Ruby was properly installed by printing out the version number:

ruby -v

# Output
ruby 2.5.1p57 (2018-03-29 revision 63029) [x86_64-linux]

SOURCE: How To Install Ruby on Ubuntu 18.04

EDIT: Install rubygems:

sudo apt-get install rubygems

Reinstalling Compass worked for me.. It's a magic!

sudo gem install -n /usr/local/bin compass