Bundler: The best way to manage a Ruby application's gems

Grouping your dependencies allows you to perform operations on the entire group.

# These gems are in the :default group
gem 'nokogiri'
gem 'sinatra'

gem 'wirble', :group => :development

group :test do
  gem 'faker'
  gem 'rspec'
end

group :test, :development do
  gem 'capybara'
  gem 'rspec-rails'
end

gem 'cucumber', :group => [:cucumber, :test]

Install all gems, except those in the listed groups. Gems in at least one non-excluded group will still be installed.

$ bundle install --without test development

Require the gems in particular groups, noting that gems outside of a named group are in the :default group

Bundler.require(:default, :development)

Require the default gems, plus the gems in a group named the same as the current Rails environment

Bundler.require(:default, Rails.env)

Restrict the groups of gems that you want to add to the load path. Only gems in these groups will be require'able

require 'rubygems'
require 'bundler'
Bundler.setup(:default, :ci)
require 'nokogiri'

Learn More: Bundler.setup

You'll sometimes have groups of gems that only make sense in particular environments. For instance, you might develop your app (at an early stage) using SQLite, but deploy it using mysql2 or pg. In this example, you might not have MySQL or Postgres installed on your development machine, and want bundler to skip it. To do this, you can group your dependencies:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.2.2'
gem 'rack-cache', :require => 'rack/cache'
gem 'nokogiri', '~> 1.4.2'

group :development do
  gem 'sqlite3'
end

group :production do
  gem 'pg'
end

Now, in development, you can instruct bundler to skip the production group:

$ bundle install --without production

Bundler will remember that you installed the gems using

--without
                production

. For curious readers, bundler stores the flag in APP_ROOT/.bundle/config. You can see all of the settings that bundler saved there by running bundle config, which will also print out global settings (stored in ~/.bundle/config), and settings set via environment variables. For more information on configuring bundler, please see: bundle config

If you run bundle install later, without any flags, bundler will remember that you last called bundle install --without production, and use that flag again. When you require 'bundler/setup', bundler will ignore gems in these groups.

You can also specify which groups to automatically require through the parameters to Bundler.require. The :default group includes all gems not listed under any group. If you call Bundler.require(:default, :development), bundler will require all the gems in the :default group, as well as the gems in the :development group.

By default, a Rails generated app calls Bundler.require(:default, Rails.env) in your application.rb, which links the groups in your Gemfile to the Rails environment. If you use other groups (not linked to a Rails environment), you can add them to the call to Bundler.require, if you want them to be automatically required.

Remember that you can always leave groups of gems out of Bundler.require, and then require them manually using Ruby's require at the appropriate place in your app. You might do this because requiring a certain gem takes some time, and you don't need it every time you boot your application.

Using Groups

Grouping Your Dependencies