Rails stops generating bundler binstub(bin/bundle)

Bin folder

In a Rails application, the bin/ folder contains executable scripts that help manage the application. These scripts are generated when we create a new Rails project and ensure that commands like rails, rake, and bundle use the correct environment and gem versions defined in the Gemfile.lock.

Example:

bin/rails – Runs Rails commands.

bin/rake – Runs Rake tasks.

bin/setup – Prepares the app for development.

Basically, Rails encourages us to use bin/rails rather than just rails because that loads the rails executable from within the bin/ subfolder of our app, ensuring we get the correct version. If we run rails all by itself, that could run any rails executable anywhere on our hard drive.

Run bin/rails s instead of rails s to run the server.

bin/bundle ensures that the correct version of Bundler is used in our Rails application when running commands like bin/rails s.

Before

Previously, when we created a new Rails app using:

rails new myapp

It generated a bin/bundle file that activated the correct version of Bundler and looked something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# frozen_string_literal: true

#
# This file was generated by Bundler.
#
# The application 'bundle' is installed as part of a gem, and
# this file is here to facilitate running it.
#

require "rubygems"

m = Module.new do
  module_function

  def invoked_as_script?
    File.expand_path($0) == File.expand_path(__FILE__)
  end
.
..continues

If we wanted to prevent binstubs like bin/bundle from being generated when running rails new, we could use the --skip-bundle option:

rails new myapp --skip-bundle

It prevented Bundler from installing gems and skipped generating binstubs, including bin/bundle.

To install gems and generate binstubs manually, we could run:

bundle install
bundle binstubs bundler

After

With the changes in PR#54687, Rails no longer generates bin/bundle when creating a new application. This change is possible because of improvements in RubyGems, specifically RubyGems PR#8345, which ensures that RubyGems automatically activates the correct version of Bundler.

Now, when we create a new Rails application using:

rails new myapp

We will notice that bin/bundle is no longer part of the project. RubyGems takes care of Bundler version management automatically, making the bin/bundle unnecessary.