Rails optional gem config

Gems that are specific to your development environment should be installed in your gemset or local gems, but not in the Gemfile.

A classic example is the ruby-debug-base19x which Rubymine needs for debugging. This is installed in your local gemset, but not in the Gemfile because not all coders use Rubymine.

[EDIT]

Indeed, everything is run in the context of the bundle, and outside gems are not reachable. There do exist some workarounds indeed. Most of them are dirty :)

I found a lot of good solutions in this bundler issue.

The nicest solution was to add this to your .irbrc :

# Add all gems in the global gemset to the $LOAD_PATH so they can be used even
# in places like 'rails console'. 
if defined?(::Bundler)   
  global_gemset = ENV['GEM_PATH'].split(':').grep(/ruby.*@global/).first 
  if global_gemset
    all_global_gem_paths = Dir.glob("#{global_gemset}/gems/*")
    all_global_gem_paths.each do |p|
      gem_path = "#{p}/lib"
      $LOAD_PATH << gem_path
    end   
  end 
end

require 'irb/completion' 
require 'rubygems' 
require 'wirble'

Wirble.init 
Wirble.colorize

If you then install wirble to the global gemset, it can then be found. Original source: https://gist.github.com/794915

Hope this helps.

I answered a similar question of my own here

User-level bundler Gemfile

One way to do this is to create different environments:

group :scott do 
end

Then

bundle --with-env=scott