In a recent twitch stream, Gary Bernhardt showed a bit of behind-the-scenes in how he prepares his development environment for recording a screencast.

One of the tools he showed in passing was gem_home by Hal Brodigan.

gem_home is a simple script that manipulates Ruby’s GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH environmental variables in order to keep separate ruby gem locations.

By using gem_home, there is no longer a requirement to prefix all ruby commands with bundle exec. All the gems for a project are local to the project, which eliminates conflicts that might arise when gems for multiple projects are mixed together in one location.

Eliminating the need for bundle exec allows commands such as rspec to execute much quicker!

Unfortunately for me, I recently switched over to using fish shell from ZSH. Hal’s gem_home only supports Bash and ZSH. 🙁

One nice thing about gem_home is how simple and straightforward it is. In a few hours I was able to replicate its functionality as a fish shell compatible script!

• https://github.com/rjkaes/gem_home

If you’re using ruby and fish shell, I would highly recommend using my implementation of gem_home along with Jean Mertz’s wrapper around chruby. Both of these play well together.