Dependency management
Published on October 24, 2021
Why do we use bundler?
Why do we use bundle install rather than gem install?
Bundler installs the exact gems and versions that are needed. It resolves all dependency conflicts for you automatically, which you would have to manually resolve if you had used gem install instead.
For example, if you have two gems requiring different versions of the same gem nokogiri:
sunspot_rails
nokogiri (>= 1.2.0)
webrat
nokogiri (>= 1.3)
If you use gem install to install sunspot_rails and webrat, it might install both 1.2.0 and 1.3.0 nokogiri versions or even complain about version conflicts. If you use bundle install instead, Bundler will resolve this dependency conflict by installing the right nokogiri version, which is 1.3 in this example.