Question

I am working with a team of developers, and we are all using the same Gemfile from our repository. Because I am working on a Mac, and others are using Ubuntu, we have a Gemfile.local.example file in our repository as well that has the appropriate notification gems for each OS, all commented out.

I un-commented the gems for my OS and saved as a new file, not in version control, Gemfile.local. Now I would like “bundle install” to install gems from both files.

I can’t find any good documentation on doing this.

Answer 1

I agree that using two Gemfiles is bad practice, and have found a solution that involves the RUBY_PLATFORM constant along with the platform flag in my Gemfile. This may not be the MOST elegant solution, but it does work for me.

Here is a chunk of my code for curious readers:

group :development, :test do
  # Mac OSX notifications
  gem 'growl_notify' if RUBY_PLATFORM.downcase.include?("darwin")
  gem 'growl' if RUBY_PLATFORM.downcase.include?("darwin")

  # Gnome notifications => aka for Linux
  gem 'libnotify' if RUBY_PLATFORM.downcase.include?("linux")

  # Guard-spork doesn't work with windows but it's
  # awesome for other Operating Systems.
  gem 'guard-spork' if RUBY_PLATFORM.downcase.include?('darwin') || RUBY_PLATFORM.downcase.include?('linux')

  # Windows Rubies (RubyInstaller)
  platforms :mswin, :mingw do
    # Windows notifications
    gem 'rb-notifu' 
  end
end