Managing Plugins/Gems for a specific app

Rails
1

I am curious to know what the best way (or most ideal way) is to
handle keeping gems/plugins updated for a Rails app that gets updated
quite frequently.

I am currently building an app that will be using like 8 plugins,
along with 9-10 gem packages. I would like to keep these updated as
well as possible while making it easy on myself to do so. Also, I want
to be sure that when deployment time comes, I make that process as
easy as possible as well.

For the plugin side of things, I have been checking out the new
“git_plugins” plugin and it looks promising.
http://www.railslodge.com/plugins/1208-git-plugins

For those of you using a lot of gems/plugins, how do you keep them
maintained and up to date easily?

–Cory

2

If you are using a recent version of (Rails 2.0+ I think) you can use
the config.gem directive in environnment.rb like this :

config.gem “hpricot”, :version => ‘0.6’, :source => “http://
code.whytheluckystiff.net”

After that, you can do a rake gems:install on new installations.

3

I found this little nugget of info from Ryan Daigle’s blog. This looks
like what you are talking about right David?

http://ryandaigle.com/articles/2008/4/1/what-s-new-in-edge-rails-gem-dependencies

–Cory

4

Yep exactly!