I was surprised to see a question on the GitHub tracker of RubyInstaller2 on how to uninstall RubyInstaller2 on Windows. I had not expected it to be a big problem. This post just quickly summarises the options.

From the start menu – failed!

I thought that it would be in the start menu but the regular Windows 10 menu actually does not show it! It only shows IRB and the API reference.

From the Classic Start Menu

If you use something like Classic Shell or more likely, Open Shell you get the old style Programs view from the start menu. In this, you will find a link to the uninstaller. Just click on it and it should work fine.

Using Add or Remove Programs

All the installed programs that have a proper uninstaller are also shown under the Add or Remove Programs settings section in Windows. Navigate to it and find the Ruby installer you want to remove.

From the Command Line

If, for some reason, none of the above methods work for you, you can call the uninstaller directly from the command line. The path to the uninstaller is unins000.exe in your Ruby directory. If you installed to the default paths, expect it to be something like:

c:\Ruby26-x64\unins000.exe
c:\Ruby27-x64\unins000.exe
c:\Ruby30-x64\unins000.exe
c:\Ruby31-x64\unins000.exe

As one of the comments on that issue points out, you can run C:\Ruby2*\unins001.exe /verysilent to remove it silently.

Brute Force – because it’s simple!

For Ruby, you could also just simply delete the entire Ruby installation directory. If you had added it to your Windows PATH, you should also remove that path entry but in reality, even if you don’t do that, it will not really make a difference.

Hope this helps.