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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T02:00:49+00:00

We are creating several applications (new development) at our company. To try and establish

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We are creating several applications (new development) at our company. To try and establish a common look and feel between these apps I would like to create a gem that:

  • Incorporates specific versions of gems like bootstrap-sass
  • Declares several common CSS styles, using mixins from bootstrap where appropriate
  • Provides other assets as well.

I want the applications that we develop to merely have to include my common-ui gem, they should not include things like bootstrap directly.

The pattern for exposing scss from a gem is pretty straight forward (just take a look at the bootstrap-sass project); where things get interesting is when my scss needs to access bootstrap. When an application includes my scss, the pipeline complains that it cannot locate bootstrap and everything comes to a halt.

What is the best approach to creating a gem that does what I have described?

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To better follow SO’s format, I am going to answer my question with what I came up with (and why I think it works). I am somewhat new to rails, so my answer is by no means authoritative. Feel free to comment or propose a better way of doing things.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    See caveat in the question, this may be a spectacularly bad way to solve this problem

    Here’s what’s working so far. For a gem to expose assets to an application’s asset pipeline, it must be initialized as an engine. The problem with one gem using another’s assets is that the other gem’s engine may not have been initialized and therefore the pipeline doesn’t know about the other gems assets.

    To work around this, just require the root file from the other gem in your root file. So in lib/company-common-ui.rb, I have the following:

    require "company-common-ui/version"

module Company
  module Common
    module Ui
      # We don't really need anything here
    end
  end
end

require "company-common-ui/engine"
require "bootstrap-sass"
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