Question

I would like to know the difference?

I can run both and they install but what is the actual difference?

I’m doing a tutorial/screencast by michael hart and he uses bundle install, how does this differ from using rvm bundle install?

I also decided to try out a trial of the “rubymine” ide and I noticed after running bundle install in terminal then opening the ide it tells me I need to update some gems so I’m sure it doesn’t install bundles in the same place.

I’ve loaded up an rvm project in it.

Answer 1

I think from this question, that you’ve not quite grasped the difference between rvm and bundler and what exactly each does. I’ll try and explain the difference.

RVM is an acronym for Ruby enVironment (Version) Manager. It’s a set of command-line scripts to help “sandbox” ruby binaries and gems for a project or set of projects. This way if you have one project that requires Ruby 1.8 and another that uses Ruby 1.9, you can switch easily between the two ruby installations and avoid nasty incompatibilities or cumbersome configuration.

You can also install different gemsets with each ruby version, so if you need to develop some applications with Ruby on Rails 2.3 and some with 3.0, or if you want to try the new 3.1 prelease, you can do so without breaking other applications’ dependencies.

Bundler is a ruby gem which, as the website says, manages an application’s dependencies through its entire life across many machines systematically and repeatably.

Bundler makes it easy to copy one application’s source from one machine to another and install all the gems and dependencies needed by that particular application quickly and (relatively) painlessly.

So I understand the confusion as there is a bit of overlap. RVM gemsets are similar to gem bundles. The difference is that bundler manages the gems and dependencies for a single application and across multiple machines. An rvm gemset is a sandbox that keeps a group of gems in one place, tied to a particular ruby installation on a single machine, sometimes used for multiple applications.

So to close, when you say you “loaded up an rvm project” in your IDE, that’s not particularly true. RVM is a sandbox, not a framework.