Quick way to view ruby gems

This post is a very short and very simple tip for easily opening a ruby gem up for closer inspection.

When reviewing a Rails or Sinatra application (code review), it sometimes becomes necessary to view the libraries (ruby gems) that an application is including and using. Instead of navigating to the ~/.rvm/gems/<version>@<gemset name>  directory (or wherever else the gems are stored) and opening them with your text editor of choice, you can instead leverage the power of bundler.

For your *nix based systems that leverage a bashrc, bash_profile, etc.

open your ~/.bash_profile file (or whatever the appropriate bash file is)

add this line export BUNDLER_EDITOR=mate

I chose "mate" because I use TextMate. Otherwise, just link to the appropriate editor executable.

(exit and save bash_profile)

type: source ~/.bash_profile

Then, navigate to an app that contains the Gemfile, and switch to the gemset or ruby version where these gems are contained, and choose a gem that you want to open...

bundle open <gem name>

That's all there is to it.

Ken (@cktricky)