Organising workflow for custom gem development

Question

I want to add some features to one gem. I've forked this gem on GitHub, add changes and push them. Then I created another rails project and add this gem with GitHub link to my repo. Now I can see changes in this gem work.

Now my workflow is:

1. Change something in the gem
2. Push changes to GitHub
3. Run bundle install in other app
4. Start server
5. Watch changes

Now I want to make my work more intensive, so I need more convenient way to organise my workflow. I want to see changes in gem without pushing to GitHub and so on. How to minimise actions to this:

1. Change something in gem locally
2. Restart rails app
3. See changes in gem work

Update 1

Installing gem with 'path' option seems not help. I add tag to main gem layout, add alert with text. Then I run my main app, and see this alert. After that I go to the gem folder, change alert text. In main app I do bundle install and bundle update, restart main app, but the text in alert didn't change

FINAL

I try to add alert not to layout, but to js script. Now my changes appear as I want. In previous edit my error was that layout is generated once and doesn't change, while scripts are included and can be updated.

Answer 1

If you use bundler you can point gems to a local path. In your Gemfile:

gem 'madeup', path: '/path/to/gem'

This will allow you to see changes immediately.

It is also worth mentioning that you can point to a GitHub repo as well. Although that won't help you in this instance, it's still useful to know.

gem 'madeup', github: 'http://github.com/user/repo', branch: 'my-branch'