Question

I’m just trying to figure out why when I create a new rails application, every time the initialization script is run the bundler installs new gems. I can’t find if and where it checks for new gems, anyone have any ideas. I’m pretty sure it does check for updated gems but if someone could verify my assumption I’d feel a lot better knowing that my apps aren’t going rogue.

Answer 1

I have seen this a fair bit. I was initially pretty alarmed but I have learned that it is because gems that you use at bundle time have been changed at the rubygems.org source and their dependencies on other gems changes and before you know it you are seeing lots of gems being downloaded, but mostly they are just newer versions of existing gems.

One approach to minimize this is to specify versions for every single gem but this is really not a good approach or practice long-term as you are basically freezing your application by locking everything done through gems and they will not move forward which can quickly lead to old inactive software. However for production software which will also be moved around and where version control is tightely controlled and tested this can be very useful. Of course versions can be done on a case-by-case (or gem-by-gem) instance for version numbers.

You can try doing two new rails app in a row (within a minute) to test that out.