Clarify 'bin/rails' vs 'rails'

[WCPetersen]

The readme suggests using direnv so that the bin executables can be called without the "bin/" prefix. However, I've been using "rails" and "spring" without the prefix and haven't had any trouble. Could someone explain what's going on?

[ddefrenne]

If you just run 'rails', RubyGems will activate the latest version of the rails executable it can find in PATH. This is fine as long as you use this version of Rails in your project. If you have a project which uses an older version of Rails and you run 'rails', you can run into problems when trying to run code that's changed in the latest Rails version. Binstubs fix this problem by making sure your environment uses the versions specified in your project's Gemfile.

More info can be found at https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv/wiki/Understanding-binstubs.

[jonleighton]

Please ask questions on Stack Overflow or similar, thanks.