Question

What do you do when you want to use a gem for development/testing that you don’t want to force other devs to use? Right now I have

begin
  require 'redgreen'
rescue LoadError
end

in test_helper.rb and no gem config, but that seems like a clumsy approach, albeit a functional one. I’d like to do something like the following:

config.gem "redgreen", :optional => true

Any other suggestions? Or should I just vendor those pretty superficial gems…?

EDIT

To be clear, I am only talking about those specific gems, like redgreen, which aren’t actually used in the functional code, but only in the coding process. There is no need to vendor these at all, except to avoid the conditional require.

Answer 1

I answered a similar question of my own here

User-level bundler Gemfile

One way to do this is to create different environments:

group :scott do 
end

Then

bundle --with-env=scott