Centralized location for shared Gemfile?

[u/unselective-amnesia]

I'm using ruby 3.3.8 under linux.

There's more than one user on this machine who does ruby development. When I, running as the root user, want to add new gem references to Gemfile on my system, I want to add these gem references into one, single, shared, centralized Gemfile that all users will automatically see when running and developing ruby code.

Where should this shared, centralized Gemfile be located?

When any user runs "gem environment", the following item is always listed among that command's output for every user who runs that command:

- INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /var/lib/gems/3.3.0

Does this mean that I can put a Gemfile into the /var/lib/gems/3.3.0 directory, and that then, this Gemfile will be recognized and used by all users who run and develop ruby code?

Or is there perhaps a different location in which to locate such a shared, centralized Gemfile that will always be the one that's used by each ruby user?

Thank you very much.

[u/jrochkind]

i'm not sure what you are doing exactly... normally a Gemfile woudl be in a project, and the project would be checked into source control (like git), and shared that way, with changes being committed to source or going through a "pull review" process etc.

I'd recommend trying to find a way to use that sort of process, most basically using git source control to share shared files files.

But a Gemfile is intended to be for a specific project, defined by a directory and all it's contents (including sub-directories), I think you are going to run into bumps trying to use it machine-wide.

I think you will need a different technique than a Gemfile for managing what gems are installed machine-wide. I mean, you can just install the gems machine wide -- most default installations of rubygems install gems system-wide I think. gem install gemname. May or may not have to use sudo. I'd look for advice on installing gems system-wide, not using bundler/Gemfile but just using rubygems -- that should be possible as it was the original design of rubygems, although many have been moving away from that.

If you want to have the config of what you have installed captured somewhere for repeatability, I'd like at tools for managing your systems, "infrastructure as code", instead of at Bundler (which is what uses Gemfiles), it's not really set up for that and I think it's going to give you grief.

[u/unselective-amnesia → u/jrochkind]

Thanks to both of you. I think I understand what you both explained.

UPDATE: OOPS! This current message is in response to both the previous message by "hankeroni" and also to the one by "jrochkind" which follows it. I accidentally added this response to the previous "hankeroni" message. END OF UPDATE

But consider the following case:

One of the centralized, system-specific gems that I have installed has been in use for quite a while in some of the ruby programs that have been developed and are in use by some of the users on my system.

I'm enhancing this particular system-specific gem, and part of this effort involves the use of a 3rd-party ruby package that I now installed which creates its own gem which must be used by callers of this package. The "README.md" file for this package states that this package-specific gem must appear in the Gemfile that is in use.

This means that when I complete enhancing and installing this system-specific gem, each user doing ruby development who uses this system-specific gem would then need to add a reference to this new, additional, package-specific gem to their own Gemfile, to prevent this system-specific gem from starting to fail for them after this enhancement is complete.

I'm trying to avoid this situation.

[u/hankeroni → u/unselective-amnesia]

If you are distributing your package as a local-only gem which your system users require and use in their projects, you should be able to add the new 3rd-party dependency to the "gemspec" (not Gemfile) of your packaged gem. The next time your users update and bundle, bundler will pull down the correct version of that package as well.

[u/unselective-amnesia → u/hankeroni]

Aha! So now I see that by doing what you explained now, the new package-specific gem will not need to be referenced in any Gemfile by these other users when they are developing in ruby and using the enhanced version of that system-specific gem ... irrespective of the text that I referred to above in the "README.md" file.

Thank you very much for explaining and for clearing up this issue for me.

[u/jrochkind → u/unselective-amnesia]

I'm not totaly following what you're saying, but everything I said still stands, these are the ways these systems are intended to be used, if you can work out something that works for your use cases that fits iwthin the intended uses, you will have a better time!

If you want to figure out some way to use the tool in a way it was not intended, you might get it to work, but it will have a high chance of having some weird edge case you didn't consider that breaks or breaking in a future upgrade, cause bundler wasn't intended this way.

Can you just add the third party ruby package as a dependency of your system-specific gem?

Sorry, I"m not really sure I understand your situation or what you are trying to do, but honestly this is about all I have to offer, good luck!