Running Mac OS X Mavericks, I have completely jacked up my Rails installation to the point that I am unable to sort out what all is wrong. I'm working through the railsapps.org book on learning rails and am simply trying to set up the test environment so I can actually start learning... Anyway, I'm so messed up now that I really just need to flush it all and start over. I have reinstalled Rails, and now the default gemset is empty. I am unable to figure out at this point how to repopulate it with the default gems (uninstalling and reinstalling Rails did not do this for me).
At this point I'm so far down a rabbit hole that I'm unable to orientate myself, so I feel like I need to just resurface and start over from zero fresh. How would I go about resetting my environment such that I can do this? I assume I need to uninstall Rails, RVM, etc?
First, make sure you are running Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9).
Start by uninstalling Ruby, for example:
$ rvm remove ruby-2.1.1
More info is on the Removing Rubies page on the RVM site.
Then carefully follow the guide Install Ruby on Rails - Mac OS X Mavericks to install Ruby 2.1.1 and Rails 4.1.
If things don't look right, for example if RVM is giving error messages, you can escalate by uninstalling RVM itself. This will removes all Ruby installations RVM manages, and everything in ~/.rvm:
$ rvm implode
Follow the Install Ruby on Rails - Mac OS X Mavericks to reinstall RVM, Ruby 2.1.1 and Rails. Take notes as you go and if you encounter any difficulties, ask a new Stack Overflow question, supplying the exact error messages and conditions that created the error. Installing Rails is the biggest obstacle to learning Rails, so good luck, and I'm sure you will succeed with the help you find here.