Bundler is excellent for managing dependencies of my applications but not for
managing my custom dependencies. There are gems that I’d like to use locally,
knowing their implications, without forcing that behavior on other developers
or designers on the team. One such gem is rails-dev-boost,
which speeds up my development environment considerably. Gemfile.local solves
this limitation. Create Gemfile.local at Rails.root with the following
content.
1 eval File.read('Gemfile')
2
3 group :development do
4 gem 'rails-dev-boost', :git => 'git://github.com/thedarkone/rails-dev-boost.git', :require => 'rails_development_boost'
5 end
Then execute these commands from Rails.root:
$ cp Gemfile.lock Gemfile.local.lock
$ BUNDLE_GEMFILE=Gemfile.local bundle
$ echo "$(cat .gitignore)\nGemfile.local\nGemfile.local.lock" > .gitignore
$ git commit -m "Added Gemfile.local to .gitignore." .gitignore
Whenever you need to use your custom Gemfile.local you can prepend the command
with BUNDLE_GEMFILE=Gemfile.local bundle exec. For example, start the rails
server by executing BUNDLE_GEMFILE=Gemfile.local bundle exec rails s and
enjoy the benefits of your custom Gemfile.