Gems Not in Local Gems After Bundle Install

Gems not in Local Gems after bundle install

Your default in this app is to install to vendor/bundle. You can tell this by It was installed into ./vendor/bundle text which appears after gems installation.

Bundler documentation specifies that you have to pass --system to install in system location:

--system: Install to the system location ($BUNDLE_PATH or $GEM_HOME) even
          if the bundle was previously installed somewhere else for this
          application

EDIT: More explanation is that your ruby knows only about gems installed with --system option when not using bundle exec. You can see your gems from vendor/bundle or whatever path you've chosen by running bundle exec gem list or (as Casper noticed) bundle list. Now it is your choice whether you want your gems in system location or in application directory.

Single file from gem missing after bundle install, included when using gem install

So the root cause of the issue was the existence of the vendor/cache from bundler, which included a version of the gem with some faulty namings. As the gem version was not bumped while troubleshooting the issue, bundler always used the cached version.

Even though the gem was uninstalled from the system completely, it was still available in the local vendor/cache. Upon bundle install in that folder, bundler realized it had that gem available and used it from the cache.
That's also why the issue didn't appear with gem install, since with that the vendor/cache created by bundle gets ignored.

Gem list doesn't show bundler after Successfully installed bundler

The PATH of the root user is likely not the same as the PATH of your current user. Therefore the gem command that root loads will not be the same as the gem command you load as a normal user. This makes sudo gem install save the gems into a different location (the location of the Ruby installation found in the PATH of the root user).

To fix this issue, the most straightforward solution is to force root to use the same gem command by giving it the full path:

sudo `which gem` install ...

Note the use of backticks. Using backticks this way, the command will essentially expand to something like:

sudo /some/path/to/the/user/ruby/installation/bin/gem install ...

To figure out if the gem command of root is different from your default gem command, you can do this:

# As normal user check output of this command
which gem

# ..and compare it to the output of this command
sudo which gem

bundle exec' complains about gem not being installed, even after 'bundle install'

After deleting the env directory and reinstalling, I noticed it created subdirectories for two Ruby versions - 2.1.0 and 2.2.0. The latter was my current version of Ruby, but the directory was empty (all the gems were installed into the env/ruby/2.1.0/gems directory). This, combined with Oliver's answer about rbenv, got me thinking about mismatched versions.

I reinstalled bundler with a simple gem install bundler, reran bundle install, and all is good.

It seems in general the answer is to sort out issues with bundler installing for a different version of Ruby than you're actually using. It seems strange to me it would use one thing for bundle install and another for bundle exec, but *shrug* whatever.

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