# Vendor/rails and vendor/plugins vs. system wide rails

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/vendor-rails-and-vendor-plugins-vs-system-wide-rails/86298>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [February 21, 2007, 9:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/vendor-rails-and-vendor-plugins-vs-system-wide-rails/86298 "2007-02-21T09:58:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Ed\_Summer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/a5b964/32.png) [@Ed\_Summer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Ed_Summer)\
**Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 9:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/vendor-rails-and-vendor-plugins-vs-system-wide-rails/86298/1 "2007-02-21T09:58:44Z")

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Hi:

I am at the end of my development cycle. I am just wondering if others  
could give me some deployment advice.

it is nice to have rails system wide thats how i have it on my Mac…  
however I have some plugin system wide and some under vendor/plugins…  
it just happen that way …Now it is nice to package everything that you  
need under vendor i.e. rails 1.2.2 plus all the plugin application  
needs. My question is are there any downside … i.e performance, maint.  
etc… that i need to think about. Is there any rails best practice?

I appreciate your response.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Ed\_Summer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/a5b964/32.png) [@Ed\_Summer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Ed_Summer)\
**Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 10:30am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/vendor-rails-and-vendor-plugins-vs-system-wide-rails/86298/2 "2007-02-21T10:30:31Z")

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I’m not sure there’s any best practice. But I highly recommend to freeze  
rails (and any other gems you use) in vendor/.

Firstly, your app works with these versions correctly. Can you guarantee  
that if a sysadmin decides to upgrade some gems (or downgrade one for  
another app?) that your application still works as expected.

Some time back a lot of people on shared hosting hosted their Typo blogs  
with a system-wide Rails gem. The admin decided to upgrade rails, and  
all Typo blogs broke. You probably don’t want that happening.

Secondly, if you want to upgrade to a new verson of a gem or maybe even  
Rails, you can test this in development first before deploying.

Thirdly, if there are multiple developers on your project, how do you  
know you all use the same gems?

I think freezing all that stuff is just great to do. As far as I know  
there are no performance downsides to this.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Ed\_Summer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/a5b964/32.png) [@Ed\_Summer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Ed_Summer)\
**Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 12:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/vendor-rails-and-vendor-plugins-vs-system-wide-rails/86298/3 "2007-02-21T12:42:18Z")

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Ariejan De vroom wrote:

> I’m not sure there’s any best practice. But I highly recommend to freeze  
> rails (and any other gems you use) in vendor/.
> 
> Firstly, your app works with these versions correctly. Can you guarantee  
> that if a sysadmin decides to upgrade some gems (or downgrade one for  
> another app?) that your application still works as expected.
> 
> Some time back a lot of people on shared hosting hosted their Typo blogs  
> with a system-wide Rails gem. The admin decided to upgrade rails, and  
> all Typo blogs broke. You probably don’t want that happening.
> 
> Secondly, if you want to upgrade to a new verson of a gem or maybe even  
> Rails, you can test this in development first before deploying.
> 
> Thirdly, if there are multiple developers on your project, how do you  
> know you all use the same gems?
> 
> I think freezing all that stuff is just great to do. As far as I know  
> there are no performance downsides to this.

Thank you. Thats what I thought. Cool!

Cheers