Bundler

Recently another developer was setting up a new laptop. This usually goes fairly smoothly, but this time we ran into a glitch. Bundler just hung. We were rather frustrated.

If you really want to skip to the end, the bottom line is: don’t try to build OS X C libraries on a FAT file system. It doesn’t seem surprising that we’d run into trouble trying to do that, but it was a bit of a long road to dig down into that. Here are the gory details.

We had a fairly straightforward setup: a git repo, a gemfile, some Ruby code — nothing too fancy. But running bundle install just left us sitting at:

] bundle install
Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/.......
Resolving dependencies...
Installing memcached (1.7.2)

I am currently working on a project using JRuby for a server-side component. One of the team’s deployment goals has been to avoid relying on the production environment having JRuby installed in it (either globally or with RVM). Instead we have been using the jruby-complete.jar to bundle the entire JRuby runtime with our application. This post that argues for using jruby-complete still does a good job of explaining why this is a good thing (even if it is a few years old).

When starting this project, I already had a pretty good blueprint on how to run a Ruby application with jruby-complete. However, in the time since that post was written Bundler has become the defacto way of managing gem dependencies. In this post, I want to share how we are using jruby-complete with Bundler in our development and production environments.

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

Bundler Hangs when Building Native Extensions on OS X

Using Bundler with JRuby Complete