bundler incorrectly trying to install "development" and "test" group gems in production

Question

I have a small web app, which uses a bunch of gems. Some of them are only used for test and development environments. Now, when I try to start unicorn on the production server using the following command, it fails.

unicorn_rails -E production -D -c config/unicorn.rb 

The error I see in the log files is:

Refreshing Gem list Could not find gem 'spork (>= 0.9.0.rc2, runtime)' in any of the gem sources listed in your Gemfile. Try running `bundle install`. 

I've pasted my gemfile below:

source 'http://rubygems.org'  gem 'rails', '3.0.1' gem 'unicorn' gem 'mongoid', '>= 2.0.0.beta.19' gem 'devise' gem 'cancan' gem 'haml', '>= 3.0.0' gem 'bson' gem 'bson_ext' gem 'formtastic' gem 'bluecloth'  group :production do   gem 'capistrano' end  group :development do   gem 'haml-rails'   gem 'hpricot', '0.8.2'   gem 'ruby_parser', '2.0.5'   gem 'less'   gem 'rspec-rails', '>= 2.0.1' end  group :development,:test do   gem 'spork', '>=0.9.0.rc2'   gem 'mongoid-rspec' end  group :test do   gem 'factory_girl_rails'   gem 'autotest'   gem 'cucumber-rails'   gem 'cucumber'   gem 'capybara'   gem 'shoulda'   gem 'database_cleaner'   gem 'test_notifier'   gem 'rspec', '2.0.1'   gem 'launchy'  end 

Bundler is supposed to detect the right environment and ignore the other gems, right? Right now, I am deleting all the lines which are not in the default group on the server to get this working, but that's an ugly hack.

Answer 1

After a lot of digging I found the fix for this issue. All I had to do was run bundle install --without development test before starting the server. This adds a .bundle/config file in the rails root with the line BUNDLE_WITHOUT: test:development . Now whenever you run bundle install or start the server it'll ignore those groups.

From the documentation

The Bundler CLI allows you to specify a list of groups whose gems bundle install should not install with the --without option. To specify multiple groups to ignore, specify a list of groups separated by spaces.

bundle install --without test bundle install --without development test After running bundle install --without test, bundler will remember that you excluded the test group in the last installation. The next time you run bundle install, without any --without option, bundler will recall it.

Also, calling Bundler.setup with no parameters, or calling require "bundler/setup" will setup all groups except for the ones you excluded via --without (since they are obviously not available).