If you’re anything like me, you’ve found the rails server and console taking longer and longer to launch lately. Even switching to Rails 3 for most active projects hasn’t really helped. But I finally found a solution a couple of weeks ago.
I found it reading Mikel Lindsaar’s Bundle Me Some Sanity where he outlines the way that bundler coupled with rvm allows a rather different and much cleaner way to manage gems in a ruby application.
I’d been aware of rvm as a way to cleanly manage different versions of ruby on a single machine, but had missed their (recent addition in 0.1.25 of) Named Gem Sets. With Named Gem Sets you can specify a version of ruby and a separate gem library for each app, reducing dependency resolution time considerably.
I already can’t imagine switching away from this.