Docker for Rails Developers

Chapter 9Advanced Gem Management

We now have a working development environment, all based on Docker. However, there’s one area that is worth a bit more thought: gem management.

Up until now, to install or update gems, we’ve simply been rebuilding the image for our Rails app. This works because bundle install is one of the steps in our Dockerfile. However, as we’ll see in a moment, there’s a slight downside to this approach compared to what we’re used to when managing gems in a non-Dockerized environment (you may have already spotted this).

In this chapter, we’ll explore an alternative approach to managing our gems that attempts to avoid the drawback by making different trade-offs (it’s more complicated for a start).

Whether you stick with ...