Fixing the RubyGems “Too Many Requests 429” error

A server on which I am working runs this command: /usr/bin/gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri aws-sdk to get the aws-sdk. I was seeing this error message:

Error: Execution of '/usr/bin/gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri aws-sdk' returned 1: ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError)
    bad response Too Many Requests 429 (https://api.rubygems.org/api/v1/dependencies?gems=aws-sdk-elasticloadbalancingv2)

Every time I ran it I’d see a different gem that triggered the 429 response. There wasn’t much out there when searching, other than a note that I should update to a new version of bundler (which I wasn’t using).

Finally, I figured out how to get past this. What I did was manually run /usr/bin/gem install -f --no-rdoc --no-ri aws-sdk multiple times, and each time the command would get a little further. Finally all the dependencies had been downloaded. Then I was able to run it without the -f switch after that.