Which gems can a Rails app survive without?

Question

• actionmailer
• actionpack
• activeresource
• activesupport

I have a basic scaffolded CRUD app that uses ActiveRecord to connect to a SQLite database and I have frozen my Rails gems.

Which of these gems could I delete without affecting my app?

Answer 1

ActionMailer can go if you'll never use e-mail, and ActiveResource is just a more REST-ful API to Rails than ActiveRecord is. You'll need the rest:

• ActionPack handles the split of web requests to controllers and views
• ActiveSupport puts a lot of mixins and syntactic sugar from Ruby into Rails

But more importantly, why do you need to delete the gems? It's not like they take up a lot of space.