Local Gemfile

Sometimes I like to use some gems that may not be present in the project Gemfile. If I have no power to add to it, or that gem only make sense to me, I use a strategy to create a local Gemfile

Let’s suppose the project uses pry but I’m a byebug fan. I will create a new Gemfile in the project root called Gemfile.local:

# Reads and evaluates the original Gemfile
eval File.read('Gemfile')

group :development do
  gem 'byebug'
end

This file will evaluate all contents of Gemfile and add the gems we describe below that line. In this case, we will use all gems plus the byebug gem in the developement group.

Now let’s copy the original Gemfile.lock to a Gemfile.local.lock to make sure we don’t change any gem version:

cp Gemfile.lock Gemfile.local.lock

And then we use the --gemfile bundle option to install the gems:

bundle install --gemfile Gemfile.local

And now we can use it:

# my_code.rb
require 'byebug'

class SomeClass
  def some_method
    byebug
    p 'Hello'
  end
end

SomeClass.new.some_method

bundle exec --gemfile Gemfile.local ruby my_code.rb

[1, 10] in my_code.rb
    1: require 'byebug'
    2:
    3: class SomeClass
    4:   def some_method
    5:     byebug
=>  6:     p 'Hello'
    7:   end
    8: end
    9:
   10: SomeClass.new.some_method
(byebug)

Nice it works. But do I need to set the --gemfile in all my commands?

Not really. We can set a environment variable for that:

export BUNDLE_GEMFILE='Gemfile.local'