Question

How do I specify a non-release version of a gem in rails?

I am continually making modifications to gem which I wish to test in my rails application. What is the best way to go about doing this?

Answer 1

One way to approach this is to specify the location of a git repository rather than a version of the gem.

For example

gem "gem_name", git: "git://github.com/your_github/gem_name.git"

specifying your local machine

gem "gem_name", git: "/path/to/repository"

Alternatively you can simply specify the path

gem "gem_name", path: "/path/to/gemfile"

but usage of a git repository allows you to keep multiple configuration in alternate
branches, specify previous commits, and a lot more than I am able to describe in this short answer. For example, the follows specifies an alternate branch:

gem "gem_name", git: "git://github.com/your_github/gem_name.git", branch: "branch_name"

See here for more details.