Installing Rails gem, the quick way

So you are going on with your next Rails project. You can’t wait to start, so you hit CTRL+ALT+T to open you favorite terminal window, and you have entered something like:

$ rails new my_cool_app

And now what? Why does it take it so long? After a few moments, you will see something similar to output bellow. But WHY is gem install actually installing and parsing documentation?

Because you actually NOT specified to install it without documentation, and on some systems without any particularly rule, installing and generating documentation can take some amount of time.

So how to do ‘gem install’ without documentation?

Easy. Even running ‘gem install — help’ can give you quick overview over some switch with which you can alter ‘gem install’ default behavior.

So, for example you can run something like this to install specific Rails version, and without any documentation:

$ gem install rails --no-rdoc --no-ri -v 4.2.0

Which obviously will install Rails 4.2.0 gem and without any docs and spare some of your time. Hoooray!

Note:

As ‘gem install — help’ stated, using ‘ — no-rdoc’ and ‘ — no-ri’ is deprecated, you can use following syntax, and modify previous command like this: (of course, that you ran ‘gem uninstall rails’ before it.

$ gem install rails --no-document -v 4.2.0