~cedric

Today I was migrating a somewhat old codebase to Ruby on Rails 6.0.0. As per usual, this can be a very tidious job requiring a bunch of depencies to be updated as well. In this case, the Gemfile contains around 150 lines.

When I have to do that kind of job, the first thing I do is commenting out every single gem except for rails itself, then bundle update, then I re-add the other gems to the Gemfile.

It rarely goes smoothly, since every gem has it’s own dependencies and sometime the bundle command has trouble to find a way to update everything in one go, so I usually re-add 2-5 gems at once then run bundle update on my modified Gemfile, until all the dependencies have been re-added.

The whole process of going back and forth to editing, saving, running the bundle command is somewhat exhausting, so today I decided to have a look at a more productive way to do this : the following command uses inotifywait to detect whenever I save the Gemfile then run bundle update automagically.

while inotifywait -e close_write Gemfile; do bundle update; done