Bundler, when attempting to update or install, will hang forever

Question

When attempting to run bundle install or bundle update, bundler will perpetually hang, and not complete its function. The only time that it will finish is when I specify a gem to update.

For example:

bundle update

Will hang forever unless I use it like this:

bundle update activerecord

Then it will complete as normal.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Answer 1

This problem is due to a missing dependency, or worse a dependency-of-a-dependency. It's common when you don't use rubygems.org as your gemserver (an enterprise environment).

Common patterns:

• You don't have that gem installed
• You don't have the dependencies of that gem installed
• You don't have that gem installed without its dependencies

---

Easiest Technique

create a new gemset, and re-bundle. This fixes the problem many times.

If you can't do that for production reasons, and you don't have an app history from which to reflect on when the problem gem was added, then:

---

Easier Technique

Having learned a bit since writing this answer, I thought I'd pass on this excellent article for how to run bundler with verbose debug output

export DEBUG_RESOLVER=1
bundle  2> debug_output.txt 1> stdio.txt &

This will dump all the debugging (err) output to debug_output.txt and the normal screen stuff to stdio.txt.

You'll want to dump 1> as well because every time bundler dumps a line to 2(stderr) it will put a crlf into 1. So Either dump 1 or background the job. I do both so I can work in the same terminal.

I usually follow it up with:

tail stdio.txt 

to be sure things have started, then:

tail -n 10000 -f debug_output.txt 

To search with /FAIL] through the file for failed attempts to install a dependency. Find a couple of them that are the same and you've generally located your culprit. The stderr works for bundle install or bundle update.

---

Debug Your Private Gemserver Technique

I needed to use this process-of-elimination method to determine that my (enterprise) gemserver index had become corrupted

1. comment out all gems
2. run bundle update to confirm the empty-set works
3. un-comment one gem and bundle update
4. GOTO 3 until you hit the problem
5. research its dependencies

---

When you are done

Unset the ENV var with

unset DEBUG_RESOLVER

Answer 2

You can try the --verbose flag too to get more output, but it's really archaic and not very helpful. Really the only way to do this from what I can see is:

1. Uncomment one gem at a time until it stops working, then try to figure out what the heck is going.
2. Remove version enforcement one gem at a time (if any) to see if that fixes it.
3. Remove the offending gem if you can (use a different gem) or lock in versions that do work.

For me, after running:

sudo bundle update --verbose

it kept hanging here:

Query Gemcutter Dependency Endpoint API: tenderlove-frex
Fetching from: http://rubygems.org/api/v1/dependencies?gems=tenderlove-frex
HTTP Success
Query List: []

Not at all helpful. I ended up figuring out that the conflict was between two gems. The following would hang forever:

source 'http://rubygems.org'
gem 'rails', '~> 3'
gem 'airbrake'

I removed the rails version:

source 'http://rubygems.org'
gem 'rails'
gem 'airbrake'

Then it worked, but I noticed in my Gemfile.lock that it was using Rails 2.3.X. So airbrake seemed to be dependent on Rails 2, but I wanted 3. I couldn't find anywhere that airbrake had this Rails 2.x dependency so not sure why it ended up like that. Why bundler can't output something more meaningful is beyond me.

This worked though:

source 'http://rubygems.org'
gem 'rails', '~> 3'
gem 'airbrake', '~> 3'

I really think there is something wrong with Bundler, but not sure.