Bundle your gems inside your project

When working on a Ruby project, I always put the files in vendor/bundle/. This has the benefit of having a greppable index of all the gems of your project, while keeping your global gemset tidy.

bundle install -j3 --path=vendor/bundle

You only need to do this once in your project. The --path setting will be persisted in your project's Bundler configuration (.bundle/config).

Inspecting your gems

Doing this will make inspecting your gem code easier. This can be conveniently done with something like ack or the silver searcher:

$ cd vendor/bundle/ruby/*/gems
$ ag all_application_helpers

  actionpack-4.2.1/lib/action_controller/metal/helpers.rb
  106:   def all_application_helpers

Globally ignoring

I recommend placing vendor/bundle/ on a global gitignore. If you haven't set up a global gitignore list yet, it's pretty easy.

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore
echo vendor/bundle >> ~/.gitignore

Goodbye, rvm!

This removes the need for managing gemsets via rvm. In fact, if your project always uses the latest Ruby (which you also should, in my opinion!), you won't even need rvm at all.

Even if you don't use this tip, you actually don't need rvm gemsets at all. Bundler solves the same problem.

Parallel installs

Bonus: the -j3 flag makes your installations faster by allowing 3 installs in parallel.