Gem compatibility in rails 2.3.4

Question

I have currently moved to a appplication on rails 2.3.4 and ruby 1.8.7 using rvm.

There are a no of gems installed in the app.When i do gem install gem_name ,it installs it but iam not sure whether the gem version is compatible with my app.The gem versions are not specified in case of many gems listed config/environment.rb.Iam unable to figure out ,how to install the correct version as unable to run the application till now. Any suggestions are welcome..

Answer 1

To provide true gem-consistency in your app, you should consider use Bundler to manage these dependencies. The Gembundler site has a good guide on setup for rails 2.x apps .

Once you have your dependencies in bundler, you can start to work out what is compatible and what isn't. In the case of third-party gems, you can search for them on the RubyGems site , and work out which version was the last to be released before Rails 3.x was released. Of course most gems will just work, but any breaking gems will possibly need to run an older version.

Answer 2

I would use Bundler, and add the gems to the Gemfile. Here is the syntax to use a specific version:

gem 'gem-name', '1.0.4'