Railyard
Rails is a slightly unusual type of gem in that it is a dependency that is installed non-globally via Bundler, but in order to generate the application skeleton that uses Rails you first have to install Rails globally.
$ gem install rails
Fetching: thread_safe-0.3.4.gem (100%)
Successfully installed thread_safe-0.3.4
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Successfully installed arel-5.0.1.20140414130214
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Successfully installed activerecord-4.1.6
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Successfully installed mail-2.6.1
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Successfully installed actionmailer-4.1.6
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Successfully installed thor-0.19.1
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Successfully installed railties-4.1.6
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Successfully installed sprockets-3.0.0.beta.2
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Successfully installed sprockets-rails-2.2.0
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Successfully installed rails-4.1.6
22 gems installed
Unfortunately, Rails has a ton of dependencies and so installing it globally makes an absolute mess of your gem list. It completely obscures any relevant information you might be trying to find in there. And good luck uninstalling it; you’re going to have to manually uninstall each dependency.
I realize this is an unusual nit, but it really bothers me. You don’t need Rails globally except to generate new app skeletons. So I whipped up a simple gem called Railyard. It sandboxes Rails, installing it locally inside the gem, on demand. You can use it to switch to any Rails version you like and generate a Rails skeleton for it, without having to install Rails globally.
$ gem install railyard
Fetching: thor-0.19.1.gem (100%)
Successfully installed thor-0.19.1
Fetching: railyard-0.1.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed railyard-0.1.0
2 gems installed
$ railyard new app_name
That’s better 😌