If gems are configured in config/environments/test.rb and "rake gems:build" is run in the production environment, the gems configured for the test environment are built. This forces the production machine to have the necessary libraries installed to build all gems used for testing.
This patch updates "rake gems:build" to only build gems configured for the current Rails.env.
+1
This is a good improvement, but I dislike that building gems loads the environment at all. If something in your environment file uses a class defined in a gem, you get a circular dependency where you need the gem you're trying to build in order to build gems at all. Seems like the only way out of this is to move the config.gem stuff into a separate file that can be used during the environment booting/initialization, or for building gems without the environment.
--josh
I recently encountered this circular dependency but I'm not a fan of by passing the environment and more importantly the preinitializer which my app makes heavy use of. The only problem I ran into was the Rails::Initializer#prepare_dispatcher method that caused my ApplicationController and/or ApplicationHelper to bomb on inclusion of things like HoptoadNotifier::Catcher.
This could be a disconnect with plugin/gem development that might involve a better way... ie, having the lib send the include when the plugin/gem is loaded. That said, I just took the short term bailout and used code like this in those files.
unless $rails_gem_installer include HoptoadNotifier::Catcher end
I'd love to know if things like #prepare_dispatcher should use conditional `if gems_dependencies_loaded` code like many others do in that class and or better solutions to the problem since my fix above only helps if you are in any of the gem namespaced rake tasks.
- Ken
Exactly. I expounded upon this at mind-numbing length in this ticket:
Summary:
1. Bottom line, the config.gems logic should be completely decoupled from environment, and invokable from preinitializer.rb. Anything else will be subject to circular dependencies.
2. Obligatory mention of GemInstaller, which does exactly this, very successfully, for many production apps, and predates config.gems (and is the reason I wrote the preinitializer.rb patch)
Thanks -- Chad
+1 for Chad's note about config.gems. I see a lot of broken builds "cross my desk" at RunCodeRun, and I can attest to how many are due to this very circular dependency. (the other is the :db => :environment one that has been fixed). Decoupling config.gems will do a ton to make dependency resolution much easier.
- Rob
+1 for this; I was very excited when rake gems came, but now I find myself never using it because of these problems.
For instance, when I download an app I want to set it up – can’t do rake db:schema:load because of missing dependency and I can’t do rake gems:install because of missing database schema.