bundler-exec

bundler is a great way to manage the gem dependencies in your Ruby project.

One of bundler's nifty features is the bundle exec command which allows you to run an executable (such as rake) in the context of your bundled gem dependencies. In other words, you'll only be able to access the gems that you've told bundler that you want to use.

To run a command in this way you need to prefix it with 'bundle exec', like so:

$ bundle exec rake my:task

It's something that you really ought to be doing whenever you run a ruby script within a bundled project, but, alas, it can become a chore.

Enter bundler-exec, which takes care of automatically pre-pending "bundle exec" to the beginning of common Ruby commands.

Installation

1. Copy bundler-exec.sh to ~/.bundler-exec.sh.
2. Source it from your ~/.bashrc file.

For example:

$ curl -L https://github.com/gma/bundler-exec/raw/master/bundler-exec.sh > ~/.bundler-exec.sh
$ echo "[ -f ~/.bundler-exec.sh ] && source ~/.bundler-exec.sh" >> ~/.bashrc

Er, that's it...

You can get bundler by installing the gem:

$ gem install bundler

See http://github.com/carlhuda/bundler for more about bundler.

Usage

To check that bundler-exec has been installed properly, use the type shell built-in command to see what it will do when you run ruby. It should tell you it's an alias, like this:

$ type ruby
ruby is aliased to `run-with-bundler ruby'

If so, whenever you run ruby (or any of the other commands listed in the BUNDLED_COMMANDS variable) you'll actually be running it with bundle exec.

If you want to run one of these commands without bundler exec you can use which to find the full path to executable and then run it, like this:

$ $(which ruby) -e 'puts "hello"'