UPGRADING.md

Upgrading

Bundler 3

The following is a summary of the changes that we plan to introduce in Bundler 3, why we will be making those changes, and what the deprecation process will look like. All these deprecations are printed by default in the Bundler 2.1 release.

If you don't want to deal with deprecations right now and want to toggle them off, you can do it through configuration. Set the BUNDLE_SILENCE_DEPRECATIONS environment variable to "true", or configure it through bundle config either globally through bundle config set silence_deprecations true command, or locally through bundle config set --local silence_deprecations true. From now on in this document we will assume that all three of these configuration options are available, but will only mention bundle config set <option> <value>.

As a general note, these changes are intended to improve the experience using bundler for new users, who have no existing usage routines nor possibly biased opinions about how the tool should work based on how it has historically worked. We do understand that changing behaviour that have been existing for years can be annoying for old users, that's why we intend to make this process as smooth as possible for everyone.

I'll be dividing the deprecations into four groups: CLI deprecations, Helper deprecations, DSL deprecations, and misc deprecations. Let's dive into each of them.

CLI deprecations

The CLI defines a set of commands and options that can be used by our users to create command lines that bundler can understand. There's a number of changes in the upcoming 3 version.

• Flags passed to bundle install that relied on being remembered across invocations have been deprecated.

  In particular, the --clean, --deployment, --frozen, --no-cache, --no-prune, --path, --shebang, --system, --without, and --with options to bundle install.

  Remembering CLI options has been a source of historical confusion and bug reports, not only for beginners but also for experienced users. A CLI tool should not behave differently across exactly the same invocations unless explicitly configured to do so. This is what configuration is about after all, and things should never be silently configured without the user knowing about it.

  The problem with changing this behavior is that very common workflows are relying on it. For example, when you run bundle install --without development:test in production, those flags are persisted in the app's configuration file and further bundle invocations will happily ignore development and test gems. This magic will disappear from bundler 3, and you will explicitly need to configure it, either through environment variables, application configuration, or machine configuration. For example, with bundle config set without development test.

  The removal of this kind of flag also applies to analogous commands, for example, to bundle check --path.

• The --force flag to bundle install and bundle update has been renamed to --redownload.

  This is just a simple rename of the flag, to make more apparent what it actually does. This flag forces redownloading every gem, it doesn't "force" anything else.

• bundle viz will be removed and extracted to a plugin.

  This is the only bundler command requiring external dependencies, both an OS dependency (the graphviz package) and a gem dependency (the ruby-graphviz gem). Removing these dependencies will make development easier and it was also seen by the bundler team as an opportunity to develop a bundler plugin that it's officially maintained by the bundler team, and that users can take as a reference to develop their own plugins. The plugin will contain the same code as the old core command, the only difference being that the command is now implemented as bundle graph which is much easier to understand. However, the details of the plugin are under discussion. See #7041.

• The bundle console will be removed and replaced with bin/console.

  Over time we found bundle console hard to maintain because every user would want to add her own specific tweaks to it. In order to ease maintenance and reduce bikeshedding discussions, we're removing the bundle console command in favor of a bin/console script created by bundle gem on gem generation that users can tweak to their needs.

• The bundle update command will no longer update all gems, you'll need to pass --all to it. (postponed)

• The bundle install command will no longer accept a --binstubs flag.

  The --binstubs option has been removed from bundle install and replaced with the bundle binstubs command. The --binstubs flag would create binstubs for all executables present inside the gems in the project. This was hardly useful since most users will only use a subset of all the binstubs available to them. Also, it would force the introduction of a bunch of most likely unused files into source control. Because of this, binstubs now must be created and checked into version control individually.

• The bundle config command has a new subcommand-based interface. (postponed)

• The bundle inject command is deprecated and replaced with bundle add.

  We believe the new command fits the user's mental model better and it supports a wider set of use cases. The interface supported by bundle inject works exactly the same in bundle add, so it should be easy to migrate to the new command.

Helper deprecations

• Bundler.clean_env, Bundler.with_clean_env, Bundler.clean_system, and Bundler.clean_exec are deprecated.

  All of these helpers ultimately use Bundler.clean_env under the hood, which makes sure all bundler-related environment are removed inside the block it yields.

  After quite a lot user reports, we noticed that users don't usually want this but instead want the bundler environment as it was before the current process was started. Thus, Bundler.with_original_env, Bundler.original_system, and Bundler.original_exec were born. They all use the new Bundler.original_env under the hood.

  There's however some specific cases where the good old Bundler.clean_env behavior can be useful. For example, when testing Rails generators, you really want an environment where bundler is out of the picture. This is why we decided to keep the old behavior under a new more clear name, because we figured the word "clean" was too ambiguous. So we have introduced Bundler.unbundled_env, Bundler.with_unbundled_env, Bundler.unbundled_system, and Bundler.unbundled_exec.

• Bundler.environment is deprecated in favor of Bundler.load.

  We're not sure how people might be using this directly but we have removed the Bundler::Environment class which was instantiated by Bundler.environment since we realized the Bundler::Runtime class was the same thing. During the transition Bundler.environment will delegate to Bundler.load, which holds the reference to the Bundler::Environment.

DSL deprecations

The following deprecations in bundler's DSL are meant to prepare for the strict source pinning in bundler 3, where the source for every dependency will be unambiguously defined.

• Multiple global Gemfile sources will no longer be supported.

  Instead of something like this:

  source "https://main_source"
  source "https://another_source"
  
  gem "dependency1"
  gem "dependency2"

  do something like this:

  source "https://main_source"
  
  gem "dependency1"
  
  source "https://another_source" do
    gem "dependency2"
  end

• Global path and git sources will no longer be supported.

  Instead of something like this:

  path "/my/path/with/gems"
  git "https://my_git_repo_with_gems"
  
  gem "dependency1"
  gem "dependency2"

  do something like this:

  gem "dependency1", path: "/my/path/with/gems"
  gem "dependency2", git: "https://my_git_repo_with_gems"

  or use the block forms if you have multiple gems for each source and you want to be a bit DRYer:

  path "/my/path/with/gems" do
    # gem "dependency1"
    # ...
    # gem "dependencyn"
  end
  
  git "https://my_git_repo_with_gems" do
    # gem "dependency1"
    # ...
    # gem "dependencyn"
  end

Misc deprecations

• Deployment helpers for vlad and capistrano are being removed.

  These are natural deprecations since the vlad tool has had no activity for years whereas capistrano 3 has built-in Bundler integration in the form of the capistrano-bundler gem, and everyone using Capistrano 3 should be already using that instead. If for some reason, you are still using Capistrano 2, feel free to copy the Capistrano tasks out of the Bundler 2 file lib/bundler/deployment.rb and put them into your app.

  In general, we don't want to maintain integrations for every deployment system out there, so that's why we are removing these.