bundle exec fatigue

September 14, 2011 code 2 min read

Tired of typing bundle exec rake? Me too. I even aliased it to bx, but that still breaks autocomplete and annoys me in subtle ways. So this week I finally remedied that situation, and thought I would share my setup since I haven’t seen anyone else with as nice of a setup.

First, bundler has a handy feature to install stubs for all of the bins in your gem dependencies.

$ bundle install --binstubs

This is great, but it creates them all in a bin directory in your project, so not only do you have to type `./bin/rake`, but you also have to ignore them from git. I’m lazy and that’s too much work!

The Final Solution

My bundler setup has 3 essential components: 1) an alias for bundle install which always installs bin stubs into .bin, 2) adding .bin to PATH, and 3) globally excluding the .bin directory from all git repos.

First, put the following in .bashrc, .profile, or .bash_profile to alias bundle install and add .bin to your PATH. :

alias bi="bundle install --binstubs=.bin"
export PATH="./.bin:$PATH"

Now every time you run bi, it will install the gem dependencies and add the bin stubs in your path so you can just run rake like the good ol’ days. Now all you need to do is create a global ~/.gitignore that always excludes .bin from every project, and tell git to use it.

$ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore

This approach has been working wonderfully for me. Now I just need to get out of the habit of typing bx.

Update: Travis Tilley pointed out rubygems-bundler in the comments. It looks like another unobtrusive (and more secure) way to accomplish this same thing.

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