Supporting ligament bypass

Question

In the Gemfile my Rails project, I am starting to have helper gems such as "ruby-debug19", "perftools.rb" or "irbtools". All of them really have nothing to do with the project, but rather are part of my local development. But since I use bundler, I cannot download these gems (even if they are installed on a system scale) unless I add them to the Gemfile. In my opinion, this is a bit of code smell.

For example, I would like to be able to require 'irbtools' in the rails console without adding "irbtools" to my Gemfile.

Is there a way to save helper stones from the Gemfile and still be able to load them for debugging, profiling, etc., when I need them?

Answer 1

Actually, you can create group in the Gemfile , for example:

 group :auxiliary do gem 'irbtools' end 

And then use bundle install --without auxiliary if you don't want to use irbtools . Why do you think adding them to the Gemfile is a smell of code? And if it is possible to do this without adding gems to the Gemfile , it will be much more of a code smell, I think.

Answer 2

Thanks to this post I have a great solution.

• Add this line to the end of your gemfile:

   eval(File.read(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/Gemfile.local'), binding) rescue nil 

• Create a file called Gemfile.local.

• Add your development stones to Gemfile local. For example:

   group :development do gem 'cucumber' end 

• Add Gemfile.local to .gitignore.

Now you can add your supporting development without changing the Gemfile for other people in the team. Very cool.

Answer 3

I put the code below in a file in my application root, so it is easy to download from irb .

If you want something like a rails server, you probably need to add a load statement to environments/development.rb , etc. This still creates problems if you accidentally check it out, but it is less annoying than adding it to the Gemfile and you will also modify your Gemfile.lock.

 # Example usage: # add_more_gems("ruby-debug-base19-0.11.26", "linecache19-0.5.13") # or # add_more_gems(%w(ruby-debug-base19-0.11.26 linecache19-0.5.13)) # # Note that you are responsible for: # - adding all gem dependencies manually # - making sure manually-added gem versions don't conflict with Gemfile.lock # To list deps, run eg "gem dep ruby-debug-base19 -v 0.11.26" # def add_more_gems(*gem_names_and_vers) gem_names_and_vers.flatten! gem_base = File.expand_path(Gem.dir) gem_names_and_vers.each do |gem_name_and_ver| # uncomment if desired ###puts "Adding lib paths for #{gem_name_and_ver.inspect}" spec_file = File.join(gem_base, 'specifications', "#{gem_name_and_ver}.gemspec") spec = Gem::Specification.load spec_file this_gem_dir = File.join(gem_base, 'gems', gem_name_and_ver) spec.require_paths.each {|path| dir_to_add = File.join(this_gem_dir, path) $: << dir_to_add unless $:.member?(dir_to_add) } end end # put your often-used gems here add_more_gems( %w( ruby-debug-base19-0.11.26 ruby-debug-ide19-0.4.12 linecache19-0.5.13 ) ) 

Answer 4

Not sure if this will work for you. It depends on whether you use RVM or not. If so, then you can set these helper gems in the gemset @global , which is created automatically for each Ruby interpreter. Gems in gemset @global are available by default for all gemet projects. This way you will not need to clutter up your gemfiles.