User-level bundler Gemfile - bundler

Question

I'd love to have a Gemfile in Bundler that just sets my own personal Gemfiles to always be bult into bundles...
aka ruby-debug, interactive-editor, and so forth.
Any idea how to do this?

Answer 1

We use this technique.
Puth this in your Gemfile:
eval File.read(File.expand_path("Gemfile.personal")) if File.exists?(File.expand_path("Gemfile.personal"))
And then add your personal gems to Gemfile.personal. Of course exclude Gemfile.personal from your version control.

Answer 2

One way to do this is to create different evnironments
group :scott do
end
Then
bundle --with-env=scott

Answer 3

I'm not 100% sure what it is you are trying to achieve, but;
If you just want to specify a number of development-only gems, you can specify a development group that can be excluded from deployments:
group :development do
gem "ruby-debug"
gem "interactive-editor"
end
Then on production or test you would do:
bundle install --without development

Answer 4

The cleanest solution I found so far is to use a separate Gemfile.personal and use a custom Gemfile path. I like this solution because you can use it in any project without modifying project code at all.
1. Add Gemfile.personal in to project root dir
# /path/to/your_ruby_project/Gemfile.personal
eval File.read('Gemfile') # use all gems from Gemfile
gem 'personal-gem1'
gem 'personal-gem2'
2. Install gems using Gemfile.personal file
BUNDLE_GEMFILE="Gemfile.personal" bundle install
# or
bundle install --gemfile=Gemfile.personal
Just remember to specify BUNDLE_GEMFILE every time you execute commands with bundler.
I personally put BUNDLE_GEMFILE=Gemfile.personal env variable in .env file using dotenv which ensures that Gemfile.personal is always used when I execute any command with bundler so I do not need to put it manually every time.
3. Put Gemfile.personal and Gemfile.personal.lock to .gitignore
For linux users:
touch ~/.gitignore
echo "Gemfile.personal\nGemfile.personal.lock" >> ~/.gitignore
This will affect all projects, so you do not need to update each project .gitignore separately.

Answer 5

My proposition does not depend on Bundler. As such does not clutter Gemfile* with your private gems for the price being a bit less convenient than answer by #ScottSchulthess.
How Bundler works
There is an array stored in $LOAD_PATH global variable which is a "load path for scripts and binary modules by load or require" (see Ruby docs) and Bundler modifies this array.
If you're developing a gem, $LOAD_PATH it will contain paths to all gems in the system. You can simply write e.g. require "pry" somewhere and pry gem will be loaded properly even if it's not mentioned in gemspec nor Gemfile. You don't have to add it to dependencies. (Of course it has to be already installed with gem install pry.)
A very different strategy Bundler takes when you're developing an application. In such case most of $LOAD_PATH will be removed on require bundler/setup (Rails calls it in config/boot.rb). Only essential paths and those pointing to gems specified in Gemfile.lock will remain there. So if you want to use pry without adding it to Gemfile, you got to append it to $LOAD_PATH before requiring it.
Solution for applications
gems_root = $LOAD_PATH.detect{ |p| %r{/bundler-} =~ p}.sub(%r{/bundler-.*}, "")
additional_gems = {
"pry" => "pry-0.10.1/lib",
"pry-rails" => "pry-rails-0.3.2/lib",
}
load_paths = additional_gems.values.map{ |p| File.join gems_root, p }
$LOAD_PATH.unshift *load_paths
additional_gems.keys.each{ |r| require r }
If you're using Rails, then save it in /config/initializers/00_custom_gems.rb and that's all. Outside Rails you additionally need to require it, preferably right after require "bundler/setup":
require "path/to/it" if File.exists? "path/to/it"
Remember to mention this file in .gitignore.
Sometimes proper gem path does not end with /lib but with architecture name. The easiest way to learn it is to add it for a moment to Gemfile and do puts $LOAD_PATH in aforementioned initializer. You can also learn those dirs from gemspec.
Solution for gems
When developing gem, you don't need to enhance $LOAD_PATH, only to require gems you want. If you need custom gems in tests and you're using RSpec, it can be done somewhere in /spec/support.
Another (less sane) idea is to add a file lib/development.rb:
require_relative "my_gem_name"
require "path/to/private/requires" if File.exists? "path/to/private/requires"
and refer to this file instead of to "my_gem_name" in your tests, demo application etc..