Comments on: Clarifying the Roles of the .gemspec and Gemfile

By: trans

trans — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 02:42:13 +0000

I kind of hate that I’m not supposed to use the Gemfile to designate dependencies for a library. The Gemfile’s API is nicer and it suites me to have them all in one place. Also, having a Gemfile with only two obvious lines is a waste of a file.

I wonder if it would work ok if we could designate a separate `:gem` or `:gemspec` group, and then the gemspec could gather dependencies from these?

By: wycats

wycats — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:11:01 +0000

@Thomas require “bundler/setup” just sets up the load path. It should be used in tests and other development-time scripts. If you want to run a gem’s executable in the context of bundler, use bundle exec.

By: wycats

wycats — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:10:13 +0000

@sampablokuper When I said “gems” I meant “libraries”.

By: Thomas Fankhauser

Thomas Fankhauser — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:00:52 +0000

How does the require ‘bundler/setup’ and Bundler.require fit in here?

I constantly have require problems during gem development although the gems are declared as a .gemspec dependency and a Gemfile override to a local path..

Some clarification when to use and when not to use would be great.. is require ‘bundler/setup’ just for applications?

Thanks and best regards!

By: sampablokuper

sampablokuper — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 04:13:17 +0000

Yehuda, I fear I’m just having a dense moment – my apologies if so – but I’m puzzled when you say, “Just to clarify, you should check in your Gemfile.lock in applications, and not in gems.”

I’m puzzled because while I could have understood if you’d made a distinction between applications and libraries, I cannot understand your having made a distinction between applications and gems.

Why can’t I understand this? Well, to quote from http://guides.rubygems.org/what-is-a-gem/ – “Gems contain a packaged Ruby application or library.”

In the light of that, please can you help me (and other readers who may be having dense moments!) by letting us know whether you stand by what you wrote, or if you instead meant to write one of the two following phrases (and if so, which):

* “Just to clarify, you should check in your Gemfile.lock in applications, and not in libraries.”
* “Just to clarify, you should check in your Gemfile.lock in projects you won’t be releasing as gems, and not in projects you will be releasing as gems.”

Finally, please can you advise what to do in the case of hybrid gems, i.e. gems which contain both library code (e.g. code that can be called by “require” statements) and application code (e.g. code that can be executed from the command line)?

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:39:53 +0000

Question:

What does it mean when Gemfile.lock has a ! in it?

For example:

rdoc (= 2.5.8)
recurly!
redis (= 2.2.1)

Thank you.

By: M. Scott Ford

M. Scott Ford — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 01:48:03 +0000

What about when developing an gem that can also be set up as an app? This is how locomotive_cms is set up at the moment. That project is maintaining both a Gemfile, Gemfile.lock and locomotive_cms.gemspec in it’s repository. The Gemfile does not reference the the gemspec. How should this be set up in your opinion?

By: Jeremy Lecour

Jeremy Lecour — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 07:58:46 +0000

Hi,

I’m using Typus (an admin generator) and it depends on a CSV library. For 1.8 it needs to install FasterCSV and for 1.9 it has CSV in the std lib.

If I understand correctly, this dependency (and others) need to be declared in the .gemspec file and included in the Gemfile through the `gemspec` method call.

If we use a condition on RUBY_VERSION in the gemspec, it is taken care of only when the gem is built, not when it is installed.

Anybody knows if this could be solved without duplicating this dependency call in the Gemfile (with a RUBY_VERSION check) ?

Thanks

Some links to help understand the context :
* the issue on GitHub : https://github.com/fesplugas/typus/issues#issue/196
* the gemspec as it is now : https://github.com/fesplugas/typus/blob/9db46b187f40a97b4e24ee933f4f0691017a8971/typus.gemspec
* the Gemfile as it is now : https://github.com/fesplugas/typus/blob/9db46b187f40a97b4e24ee933f4f0691017a8971/Gemfile

By: Jonah

Jonah — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:48:09 +0000

Thanks, Yehuda. A much-needed clarification.

By: Hedgehog

Hedgehog — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:26:04 +0000

Thanks for an interesting post.
DevOps deploying using Chef might (eventually) like to use Bundler to manage their cookbooks – esp. when the app developer and deployer are the same person. It is early alpha days, but the following gives some detail:
http://hedgehogshiatus.com/carving-and-bundling-chef-cookbooks-alpha-2

There will be a “Carving and Bundling Chef Cookbooks – Beta” post that updates this to reflect that you can point Bundler at any Git repo using all Git URI’s, bar one (naked `/path/`), and reflects:

[hedge@desktop bundler]$ rake spec:ruby:1.9.2-p0

508 examples, 0 failures, 6 pending

Hopefully some app deployment needs could be taken into consideration for Bundler 1.1?

Feedback welcome.