CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubybundler
Sean Mackesey
Sean Mackesey

Reputation: 10939

Deploying a Ruby Command Line Application that Depends on Non-Rubygems-Hosted Gems

I am attempting to deploy a small command-line application written in Ruby. Many of the gems that the application depends on are hosted on my github account. I have specified their locations in the Gemfile appropriately. When I clone the repo on the deployment machine and run bundle install from the root, all goes smoothly. I can then run the command line app (named "hippo") with bin/hippo. I would like to install the app to the system so that I do not need to patch $PATH or specify the path to the executable in order to use it.

When I run gem install /path/to/my/.gem/file, installation fails and says that it cannot resolve the dependencies to my personal gems hosted on my Github account. I gather this is because the gem install command does not read the Gemfile, only the gemspec (why on earth did the bundler people name their file Gemfile instead of BundleFile or something?), and the locations of the gems are specified in the Gemfile (there is no way to point to a github gem in a gemspec, right?). I have the same issue when I use the rake install task that comes with a bundle-scaffolded gem. However, when I run bundle exec gem install /path/to/my/gemfile then it installs OK, I guess because it sees my gems on the bundler-altered load path and decides that they are already installed. But then, when I try to run the executable, it fails because it can't find the dependencies when they are required. (Note that the executable has require bundler/setup as its first line after the shebang).

So I ask: what is a good way to deploy, with bundler, a command line application that depends on non-rubygems-hosted gems?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 383

Answers (1)

Tim Moore
Tim Moore

Reputation: 9482

bundle exec sets up your load path correctly so that the gems are visible when you require bundler/setup. One option would be to always run your binary with bundle exec bin/hippo.

Something more suited to your purposes might be to run bundle install --standalone, which generates a bundle/bundler/setup.rb file within your project's directory. That file sets up load paths correctly for you, so you'd just need to do something like require_relative '../bundle/bundler/setup' from your binary instead of require 'bundler/setup'.

Upvotes: 1

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