Today I was working on my Gem  Toolshed and wanted to install it globally. That way I wouldn’t have to add it to each of my projects Gemfile. Then run bundle install on each. The reason why I didn’t want to do that was first of all would take more time than I wanted. Also if I could just install it globally I wouldn’t have to worry about installing it for new projects. Also for this type of Gem it’s nice to be able to use it outside of a projects context. So I attempted to install it globally so that it could be used by all my projects. I am not too familiar with rvm or bundler to be honest. I have used both of them but I don’t understand enough about them to be called an expert. So I ran the following command in an attempt to install it globally. Note that I did not pull this command out of thin air I found it on a stackoverflow post and it looked promising.

gem install /home/path/to/gem

After spending several hours debugging it I finally figured out what was happening. Well it turns out that not only does that command not work but it also switches the gem install default to that directory. I figured this out through several debugging steps. The first step was when I went into a different project and did bundle install. This is a project that I have been working on for a while so I was expecting it to just work. Well when I ran bundle install I seen it was looking at my gems directory. I was thinking well something must be in the path and kind of just ignored it. I didn’t put the two together for a while. After thinking about it for a while I thought that bundler has to be smart enough to know my rvm is setup to use a specific gemset. Well it turns out that is not the case if you have a customized path like I did. It installs it to whatever directory you put in that path above. I verified that this was happening by going into my Gems directory and there is was a ruby directory with ruby installed. After doing some searching on how to fix it I found that this worked to reset the gem install back to the default directory.

bundle install --system

After doing that my system was back to normal and I was able to run bundle install again without any issues. I hope that this post can provide some insight that bundler and rvm don’t always work hand and hand. If you ever try the gem install command above remember to set it back so all your bundler commands work as expected. At least I can say I now understand more about bundler and rvm as a whole.