Rails mountable engine: how to bundle in each app that uses it?

Question

I have a private rails mountable engine (in a private repo) that several of my projects use.

It is included with a local path in their Gemfile.

Is there a way to package the engine during deployment into each app's repo? (maybe via /vendor/cache or something).

i.e. So I wouldn't need to do these two steps which I currently have to do:

• Have the engine in it's own folder on the server that the apps have to reference (with that relative path).
• After updating the engine, I can chose which app gets the latest updates of the engine. (Right now when I commit engine updates in the repo and update it on the production server, all apps using get the updates).

From the rails documentation, I could add the engine gem as gem 'blorgh', path: "vendor/engines/blorgh" But how do I keep the engine code in a central place and cherry pick which app gets the update?

Answer 1

I would make a private repo on Github, and reference it by :git in each app's Gemfile and use :tag, :branch, or :ref to do you cherry-pick work.

# in app1 Gemfile.rb
gem 'blorgh', :git => 'git@github.com:jacob/blorgh', :tag => 'v1.1'

# in app2 Gemfile.rb
gem 'blorgh', :git => 'git@github.com:jacob/blorgh', :ref => '4aded'

Hope this can help.