Blog | Rubyyot

Until I found this (recently), I have been guilty of not configuring my gems for my rails apps.  Apparently these features have been around for a while and can be really helpful when deploying or doing team development with rails and gems.

What it does

• Requires gems automatically
• Documents the gems you used
• Allows you to specify gems by environment.   This is key so you don’t have to require testing gems for a production environment.
• Provides rake tasks for freezing,  installing and checking the status of the required gems.
• helps to ensure that functionality you depend on gems for will be working.

Rake Tasks

Here is a listing of gem related rake tasks.

 rake gems                             # List the gems that this rails application depends on
 rake gems:build                       # Build any native extensions for unpacked gems
 rake gems:install                     # Installs all required gems.
 rake gems:refresh_specs               # Regenerate gem specifications in correct format.
 rake gems:unpack                      # Unpacks all required gems into vendor/gems.
 rake gems:unpack:dependencies         # Unpacks all required gems and their dependencies into vendor/gems.
 rake rails:freeze:gems                # Lock this application to the current gems (by unpacking them into vendor/rails)
 rake rails:unfreeze                   # Unlock this application from freeze of gems or edge and return to a fluid use of system gems

• rake gems:unpack variants are helpful to make sure that you deploy the same gems from your development environment to your production environment, even if it’s on a shared host.
• rake rails:freeze:gems does the same for the rails gems.
• A simple rake gems will give you an overview of your gems like this:

rubyyot@atlas:$ rake gems

(in /home/rubyyot/working/examples)

 - [F] ruby-openid
 - [F] paperclip
 - [I] RedCloth
 - [F] sqlite3-ruby
 - [F] ruby-openid >= 2.0.4

I = Installed
F = Frozen
R = Framework (loaded before rails starts)

Example

Here are my configured gems from a project I’m currently working on.

config/enviroment.rb

  config.gem "ruby-openid", :lib => 'openid'
  config.gem "paperclip"
  config.gem "RedCloth", :lib => 'redcloth'

config/environments/development.rb

  config.gem "sqlite3-ruby", :lib => "sqlite3"

config/environments/test.rb

 config.gem "notahat-machinist", :lib > 'machinist', :version => '0.3.1'
 config.gem "faker", :version => '0.3.1'
 config.gem "sqlite3-ruby", :lib => "sqlite3"

config/environments/production.rb

config.gem "mysql", :lib => "mysql"

More

If you are interested, there is a Railscast episode on this topic.

Tags: configuration, environment, gems, ruby on rails

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