What’s New in v1.17

The Bundler 1.17 announcement includes context and a more detailed explanation of the changes in this version. This is a summary of the biggest changes. As always, a detailed list of every change is provided in the changelog.

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.

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• Add --only-explicit option to bundle outdated to only show outdated gems that are listed directly in the Gemfile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.

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.