How to redirect gem file installation

Question

The edited gem file is located in the same folder as the application I'm working on. The path is /Users/name/Ruby/Instagram. I need to install it, but I can't just use gem 'gem_name' install because it will install the general version from GitHub. How can I make it install the gem I just made changes to?

Also, I'm using RVM and can't get into the .rvm file to just drag and drop.

Answer 1

Here is my setup: Whenever I work on my edited version of the gem or want to load that to the app I do RAILS_ENV=development bundle install, when I want the live version I do bundle install.

You need to have the version different, even a patch version 1.0.0 to 1.0.1 will work so bundle will update the .lock file with the correct paths.

version = '0.1.0'
if ENV['RAILS_ENV'] == 'development'
  gem 'lorem', version, path: "/home/#{ENV['USER']}/work/lorem"
else
  gem 'lorem', version, git: '[email protected]:ipsum/lorem.git'
end

To simplify this and only get your local version you can do something like this:

  gem 'lorem', 0.1.1, path: "/Users/#{ENV['USER']}/Instagram/gem_folder/"

then you change the version of the gem to be different from the live one, and run bundle install.

Answer 2

There are a couple of possibilities:

You could give the gem a different name.

You could give the gem a higher version number than the original one, then it will be preferred … until the original author releases an higher version.

You could set up your own repository and put it first in the search list (this is generally a good idea if you want to make private gems). Again, this only works if your version number is at least as high as the official one.

You could simply pass the path to the gem file to gem install. But again, this will only work until the original author releases a version whose number is greater than yours.