Using local sources in Gemfile

Let’s imagine we develop application, depending on a couple of our own gems. Or, say, we decide to break a functionality into several gems. The main application Gemfile thus contains references to our gems among all others.

gem 'mycutegem'

The above uses the gem from Ruby Gems , which is quite inconvenient in our case: we modify it simultaneously. There is option to supply path to load the source locally:

gem 'mycutegem', :path => '../mycutegem'

This is hardly acceptable because Gemfile became inconsistent with remote repository. Unfortunately, we cannot specify rules for different groups in the Gemfile , like:

gem 'mycutegem', :path => '../mycutegem', :group => :development
gem 'mycutegem', '~> 0.9.3', :group => :production

You cannot specify the same gem twice with different version requirements.

The solution is simple. There is an ability to inform bundler about our local copy of repository:

$ bundle config local.mycutegem /home/am/Projects/mycutegem

The latter should be a path to local git repository . Now the following code will use our local version of repository (with all the hot changes,) while all others will use the public source ( :branch is mandatory):

gem 'mycutegem',
    :git => 'git://github.com/mudasobwa/mycutegem',
    :branch => 'master'