Sane way to manage dependencies in Ruby

I still don’t know what’s the proper way to deal with dependencies with Ruby. I’ve spent a few hours searching, but I don’t see any kind of agreement between Rubyists for this.

A lot agree that Bundler is the right way to go, but the default configuration is still installing dependencies globally, and it quickly makes conflicts between different Ruby projects.

I’m used to PHP and Node.js environments, where dependencies are simply managed per project, in a vendor or node_modules directory. This way, dependencies are contained in the project, there’s no conflict across projects, and it’s easy to bundle them! Why don’t Ruby or Python do this way?

Anyway, I managed to achieve a similar behavior with Bundler. The key is the .bundle/config file, that needs to be copied in every project:

BUNDLE_PATH: vendor

Then, bundle install will create the vendor directory, with contained dependencies. You now need to run all your commands with bundle exec so the Ruby environments is set properly to find dependencies in the vendor directory.