Question

I bought Crafting Rails Applications this weekend and noticed that the author uses

bundle exec rails server

to start the development server. What’s the advantage of using this command over a simple “rails server”? Is it simply to keep gem dependencies under control?

Answer 1

bundle exec runs the server in the context of the bundle that you have installed…
rails s or rails server does almost the same.

But if you are using rvm or something else you might have some special bundles with special versions of the gems.