Bundler 1.1 Prerelease is Worth It

In two posts from last year, Pat Shaughnessy discusses why Bundler 1.1 will be much faster and how to use some of the new features. Ordinarily, I avoid prerelease gems because I don’t want to risk the stability of an application. My release schedule won’t often align with a gem’s, assuming there is one.

I finally realized today that this doesn’t matter. Unlike the rest of the gems your Rails application uses, Bundler lives above the fray. It is perfectly safe to use a prerelease version of Bundler on your development machine and stick to the stable release on your production servers.

I encourage you to give it a try. bundle install imposes practically no overhead over the actual gem installation time, and bundle outdated is tremendously useful when planning for gem updates.

$ gem install bundler --pre