Installing Ruby Gems

Question

When I run Ruby commands such as

gem install heroku

or

gem update --system

I receive the warning

ERROR:  Could not find a valid gem 'heroku' (>= 0) in any repository
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError)
Errno::ECONNREFUSED: No connection could be made because the target machine
actively refused it. - connect(2) (http://rubygems.org/latest_specs.4.8.gz)

I've looked through several related posts, most of which suggest network issues; I've turned off all anti-virus/firewall software, but had no luck. Note that others on the same network aren't facing these problems. I'm baffled as to how to proceed.

 RubyGems Environment:  

- RUBYGEMS VERSION: 1.5.2
- RUBY VERSION: 1.8.7 (2011-02-18 patchlevel 334) [i386-mingw32]
- INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: C:/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.8.7/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
- RUBY EXECUTABLE: C:/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.8.7/bin/ruby.exe
- EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: C:/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.8.7/bin
- RUBYGEMS PLATFORMS:
  - ruby
  - x86-mingw32
- GEM PATHS:
   - C:/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.8.7/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
   - C:/Users/xxxxx/.gem/ruby/1.8
- GEM CONFIGURATION:
   - :update_sources => true
   - :verbose => true
   - :benchmark => false
   - :backtrace => false
   - :bulk_threshold => 1000
- REMOTE SOURCES:
   - http://rubygems.org/

Answer 1

Old post, but this might help someone else. Specify your proxy. This seems to work even though the http_proxy environment variable is already set:

gem install heroku --http-proxy http://yourproxyserver:port

Answer 2

May I suggest that you download the archive: http://rubygems.org/pages/download#formats

And then installing it using the instruction give on the page.

Does this work:

$ gem install slimgems

Answer 3

1. Check if you can access the internet
2. If you're behind a HTTP proxy server, take a look at this question
3. If 1 and 2 don't help you, post some more info.

Answer 4

Try and download http://rubygems.org/latest_specs.4.8.gz. Does that work? If it still dosnt work then you have a network issue.