Does bundle update install gems that haven't been installed before

Question

This is just a general question about bundle install and bundle update and it's literally as simple as the title. Does bundle update do bundle install to the files that weren't installed beforehand?

Answer 1

In short, yes.

bundle update will install the latest version of all gems listed in your gemfile, regardless of what you have in Gemfile.lock . Eg if you were to add rails to your Gemfile without previously having run bundle install bundle update would install the rails gem.

To do this, run bundle update, which will ignore the Gemfile.lock, and resolve all the dependencies again

source

Answer 2

Running bundle update does two things:

1. Update Gemfile.lock to the latest versions available, using Gemfile as the source of information for updating Gemfile.lock .

2. Run bundle install to make sure all these gems are present in your system.

So yes, if you add a gem to Gemfile and then run bundle update , it will install this new gem for you too.

Answer 3

Bundle Update will actually update the versions of the gems that you have bundled, see: http://bundler.io/man/bundle-update.1.html#NAME

Whereas Bundle Install will install the missing gems that were not previously installed, see: http://bundler.io/v1.13/man/bundle-install.1.html#NAME