So I know I’m obviously biased, but I prefer to use GemTools over the gem management feature in Rails. and here’s why.
I can deploy an app to a new server instance and not even need to have rails installed. All I have to do is
cap production deploy:setup && cap production deploy
and my cap tasks will install the full stack, including Rails.
I can also use GemTools without Rails.
I know that I will get the version of my gems that my app expects.
I’ve seen issues with using vendored gems (hpricot I’m looking at you) where even with a frozen gem it will try and include the newest version of the gem installed locally.
Don’t get me wrong, any compiled gems are going to fail in a vendored cross platform environment if the person that vendoerd it was on a different platform.
These are just a couple of the reasons that I prefer to use
gemtools install
over config.gem
I’m sure I’m in the minority, but that’s ok.
Comments
I’ve never used GemTools, but I used to use geminstaller for similar reasons. However, as config.gem has matured, it has gotten to the point where I am switching applications over from geminstaller; rake gems is a big reason for this.
And for the use case of Capistrano installing everything, you don’t need GemTools. Just put in a suitable Cap task to install the Rails gems to bootstrap the system; then you can rely on config.gem.
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