How to fix: Gems are unavailable although they are installed

• If Rails or Rake are complaining about a missing gem that is listed in your Gemfile.lock and the listed version is properly installed, something is seriously wrong and needs to be fixed.
• If you accidently executed bundle install some_gem although you wanted bundle update some_gem

What is wrong

Let's say your Gemfile asks for some-gem which you can see when running gem list but bundle show some-gem just gives you an error:

Could not find gem 'some-gem', in any of the sources

Another indicator: Doing a bundle install --local breaks and bundle install installs every gem from scratch. Don't ignore that or just go with it! Something is up.

Solution

Maybe you are using a separate Gemfile.something for some Ruby scripts that don't require the whole application setup? Take a look at your application's release directory.

When you do ls -la you then probably can see a Gemfile.something and a .bundle directory. The contents of the .bundle directory redirect all gem calls to another configuration in the Gemfile.something directory, preventing your application from seeing the gems it needs.

Remove those wrong and unneccesary directories and Rake and Rails will boot again.

To avoid this in the future, make sure everybody installs gems on remote servers properly by using the install-gems-remotely command from our geordi gem Show archive.org snapshot .\
Also, don't run bundle install as root (or sudo it), especially not in your release directory.

Hint for github shorthand

If your using something like gem 'font-awesome-sass', github: 'makandra/font-awesome-sass' and get an error Could not find gem 'font-awesome-sass', in any of the sources, specifiy the version:

gem 'font-awesome-sass', '=4.1.0', github: 'makandra/font-awesome-sass'