Question

I’ve been told that doing:

config.gem 'tzinfo'

doesn’t obviate the need to require 'tzinfo'. Is this true of all gems? If yes, what exactly does adding config.gem WHATEVER do?

Answer 1

config.gem should cause the gem to be automatically required. You should not need to do a manual ‘require’ call.

config.gem

1. Tells Rails to load this gem automatically
2. Tells Rails that this gem is needed for the application, so that rake gems:install will install it
3. The :source option can tell rails to get it from a nonstandard repository
4. The :lib option can tell rails to load a non-standard file from the gem (i.e. something not named after the gem itself)