The Bundler team is excited to announce Bundler v1.17.0, our next feature-packed release! Most of the changes in this release are the result of the work from our wonderful contributors whom we would like to thank. ❤️

Here are a few features we want to highlight:

Remove gems from the CLI

We’ve added a new command called remove that allows you to remove gems from the command line. Here’s a quick example:

# Gemfile
source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'rake'
gem 'json'

We can now remove a gem using bundle remove:

$ bundle remove json
Removing gems from Gemfile
json was removed.

Bundler will then remove the json gem from the Gemfile. There also is an --install option that will run bundle install after the gem has been removed.

Thanks to agrim123 (Agrim Mittal) for developing this feature.

New command options

We’ve added a few options that extend existing features and improve the overall user experience:

• Add --optimistic and --strict options to bundle add that will add a version constraint to new gems
• Add --gemfile option to bundle exec
• Add --skip-install option to bundle add to skip running bundle install when adding a new gem
• Add --only-explicit option to bundle outdated to only show outdated gems that are listed directly in the Gemfile

New plugin events

We’ve added new events into Bundler for plugins. Libraries are now able to perform an action before and after each gem is installed.

We are excited to see plugins take advantage of these events, and enhance the user experience on top of Bundler.

Thanks to jules2689 (Julian Nadeau) for working on this!

Bundler home, plugin, cache and config environment variables

Users have been asking for a feature that will allow them to specify a location for Bundler to place any files/folders that it creates or downloads, but until now Bundler has been hardcoded to place all of its files into ~/.bundle. To solve this issue, we’ve added some environment variables that (optionally) let you tell Bundler exactly where to put its files.

To change the directory where Bundler will store all user-level files (which is ~/.bundle by default), set BUNDLE_USER_HOME. To change the directory where Bundler caches downloaded gems and gem metadata (which is ~/.bundle/cache by default), set BUNDLE_USER_CACHE. To change the location of the user-level configuration file (which is ~/.bundle/config by default), set BUNDLE_USER_CONFIG. Finally, to set the location that Bundler will look for plugin files (which is ~/.bundle/plugins by default), set BUNDLE_USER_PLUGIN. To see a more detailed description of the change and the reasons behind it, check out the awesome pull request from @gwerbin.

And a whole lot more!

There is a lot more that we’ve added into this release. For a more detailed list of changes, check out the CHANGELOG.

Upgrading from Bundler 1.16

Run gem install bundler to upgrade to the newest release of Bundler.

We hope you enjoy this release. Happy Bundling!