[ruby] Update just one gem with bundler

I use bundler to manage dependencies in my rails app, and I have a gem hosted in a git repository included as followed:

gem 'gem-name', :git => 'path/to/my/gem.git'

To update this gem, I execute bundle update but it also updates all the gem mentioned in Gemfile. So what is the command to update just one specific gem?

I've used bundle update --source myself for a long time but there are scenarios where it doesn't work. Luckily, there's a gem called bundler-patch which has the goal of fixing this shortcoming.

I also wrote a short blog post about how to use bundler-patch and why bundle update --source doesn't work consistently. Also, be sure to check out a post by chrismo that explains in great detail what the --source option does.

You simply need to specify the gem name on the command line:

bundle update gem-name

It appears that with newer versions of bundler (>= 1.14) it's:

bundle update --conservative gem-name

bundler update --source gem-name will update the revision hash in Gemfile.lock which you can compare with the last commit hash of that git branch (master by default).

GIT remote: [email protected]:organization/repo-name.git revision: c810f4a29547b60ca8106b7a6b9a9532c392c954

can be found at github.com/organization/repo-name/commits/c810f4a2 (I used shorthand 8 character commit hash for the url)

bundle update gem-name [--major|--patch|--minor]

This also works for dependencies.

The way to do this is to run the following command:

bundle update --source gem-name

If you want to update a single gem to a specific version:

1. change the version of the gem in the Gemfile
2. bundle update

> ruby -v
ruby 2.6.5p114 (2019-10-01 revision 67812) [x86_64-darwin19]
> gem -v
3.0.3
> bundle -v
Bundler version 2.1.4