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My Rails site uses a certain gem which is really not very good. Every time I need to do something new I end up having to spend as much time adding features to the gem as I do adding code to the actual Rails project. But I don't mind, and I have my Gemfile set up to point to my GitHub fork of the gem (I tried submitting PRs, but the maintainer seems to have stepped down).
The problem is that I really haven't found a sane way of testing new things I add to the gem. It'd be especially nice to test it within rails c, but the only ways I can think of doing that are a) Changing ~/.rvm/gems/.../foo.rb, which doesn't seem right or b) Bumping the version, pushing to Github, and running bundle up, which in addition to being time-consuming is obviously a disaster since I don't know for sure whether the commits I make are right or not.
I'd even be perfectly happy with a standard irb. But various permutations of require lib/foo from within the gem's directory don't work.
So what's the best practice here?
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There are several ways to specify gem versions: Use a specific version: gem "name-of-gem", "1.0" . You can find specific versions on Rubygems.org (provided that's the source you”re using) by searching for your gem and looking at the “Versions” listed. Use a version operator: gem "name-of-gem", ">1.0" .
You may browse and search for gems using the RubyGems website, or use the gem command. Using gem search -r , you can search RubyGems' repository. For instance, gem search -r rails will return a list of Rails-related gems. With the --local ( -l ) option, you would perform a local search through your installed gems.
Use `gem install -v` You may already be familiar with gem install , but if you add the -v flag, you can specify the version of the gem to install. Using -v you can specify an exact version or use version comparators.
A Gemfile is a file that is created to describe the gem dependencies required to run a Ruby program. A Gemfile should always be placed in the root of the project directory.
If you are using a gem and working on it at the same time, the best way is to use Bundler and provide a local path:
gem 'my_bad_gem', path: '../my_bad_gem/'
This will look for the gem under the given (relative in this case) path. Another option is to use local git repositories (see http://bundler.io/v1.3/git.html).
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