Forking a gem for a Rails project

Question

I\'ve found myself twice in this situation: I install a gem on my system and start using it from my Rails project. Eventually I need to make some changes to that gem. How sh

Answer 1

Today this is pretty easy to do with Bundler. You make a local copy of the gem and then instead of doing

gem "whatever"

in your Gemfile, you do:

gem "whatever", :path => "/home/pupeno/whatever"

After running bundle install, the gem is picked from that directory. Even if you modify something in there, all you need to do to re-load it is restart Rails.

If you need to deploy an application using your own changes of a Gem, you make a fork, on Github or similar and on the Gemfile you do:

gem "whatever", :git => "git@github.com:/pupeno/whatever.git"

and that's it. It's simple, straightforward and beautiful.