Using Project-Specific Gems Without Bundle Exec

If you use Ruby a lot like I do, you’ve probably gone through at least a few steps of this cycle:

  1. Ruby is awesome! :metal:
  2. Now, I just need to figure out how to make it do more :cry:
  3. RubyGems are awesome! :metal: They help me make Ruby do more!
  4. But managing them is a pain :cry:
  5. Bundler is awesome! :metal: It manages the Gems and their dependencies!
  6. But I just need to figure out how to always use the right version when I’m working on a specific project that uses different versions than everything else :cry:
  7. bundle exec is awesome! :metal: It loads the right versions of everything for the current project!
  8. But it is a lot of typing for every command :cry:
  9. Aliases are awesome! :metal: Now I only have to type be rake instead of bundle exec rake!
  10. Bundler binstubs are awesome! :metal: Now I only have to type bin/rake instead of be rake:confused:
  11. Huh … that isn’t any better, as a matter of fact, that’s more typing. And I have to remember to do the extra step of generating the binstubs for every project. Why bother in that case?

And that’s where things stopped for me for a long time … Until now! :metal: Ok, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s what I figured out recently …

I’ve been slowly refining my dotfiles project using Thoughtbot’s dotfiles as a basis. There is a lot to grok in that collection of useful tools and settings and I’ve been taking my time figuring it out. One thing that I noticed, but didn’t think much of was this little bit of code in the shell profile:

# mkdir .git/safe in the root of repositories you trust
export PATH=".git/safe/../../bin:$PATH"

At least, until recently when I put two and two together. I remembered that I could use Bundler’s binstubs, which, combined with this trick would allow me to type simply rake instead of bin/rake or even be rake. Assuming you already have a project that uses Ruby, RubyGems and Bundler, here’s how:

  1. Add the above PATH modification to your shell profile. Ensure that you execute it after utilities like rbenv or rvm.
  2. From within your project directory:
    1. Execute bundle binstub GEM. For example: bundle binstub rake
    2. Execute mkdir .git/safe

Now, if you execute which rake you should see that it points to the newly-generated binstub instead of the globally-installed one. Party on dudes! :metal:


        

Copyright © 2010-2022 by Lee Dohm