Global Gemfile in the user's home directory using rbenv: good idea?

Question

I am using rbenv to manage my gems, locally in my projects but also globally, on a Linux box.

When I bump my global ruby version (set in ~/.rbenv/version), I always forget to install some of my utility gems, that I need for development mainly.
Examples are rubocop for linting, minitest for some scripts I have scattered in my files, etc.
Using my package manager is not a really flexible solution (not so up-to-date, many gems are not packaged etc).

How should I proceed to keep a list of these gems I want to always have globally accessible, whatever the project I am currently working on? Should I have a Gemfile and a Gemfile.lock in my home directory? How could I hide them then (.Gemfile/.Gemfile.lock)?

So that once I change the global ruby version, then a

$ gem install bundler
$ bundle

and I have everything up and running? In this case would I have to prepend every command with bundle exec?

Is there a better way to manage this problem that I am not aware of?

Answer 1

I suggest using rbenv-default-gems.

Just install it into rbenv's plugins folder:

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv-default-gems.git $(rbenv root)/plugins/rbenv-default-gems

Place a file named default-gems into your rbenv's root folder:

touch $(rbenv root)/default-gems

Add gems in $(rbenv root)/default-gems by name, one per line. You may need to optionally specify a version string after the name, or --pre to install a pre-release version. For example:

bundler
bcat ~>0.6
rails --pre