Isolate

Description

Isolate is a very simple RubyGems sandbox. It provides a way to express and install your code’s Gem dependencies.

When Isolate runs, it uses GEM_HOME, GEM_PATH, and a few other tricks to completely separate your code from the system’s RubyGems configuration, leaving it free to run in blissful solitude.

While Isolate doesn’t make any assumptions about what sort of code you’re writing, it was extracted from a few Rails apps, so it’s naturally going to be most useful with stuff like Rails, Merb, or Sinatra.

Isolate is very, very, very stupid simple. For a much more full-featured Gem bundler, check out Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche’s Bundler: It does a lot of fancy AOT dependency resolution, supports non-gem resources, and is probably a better fit for you. For a widely used Gem manager and installer, check out Chad Woolley’s GemInstaller.

YMMV, but I haven’t tried Isolate with anything older than RubyGems 1.3.5.

Examples

Defining Your Isolated Environment

It’s pretty easy: gem is similar to RubyGems’ method of the same name. Version specifiers are optional.

require "rubygems"
require "isolate"

Isolate.gems "vendor/isolated" do
  gem "johnson", "~> 1.1" # or maybe...
  gem "jbarnette-johnson"
end

At the end of the Isolate.gems block, you’re completely isolated. GEM_PATH and GEM_HOME are set, and all your specified gems have been activated.

Conditionals

Sometimes different sets of gems are appropriate at different times. Isolate allows you to restrict gems by ‘environment’ (which is really just a string passed in when things are activated).

Isolate.gems "vendor/isolated" do
  gem "intercession"

  environment :test, :cucumber do
    gem "mocha"
  end
end

Unsurprisingly, the mocha gem will only be activated in the test and cucumber environments. See the Rails example below for an example of how to use RAILS_ENV to set your environment.

Passthrough

Sometimes (especially on systems with alternative Gem management like Heroku) you want Isolate to sit in a corner, be very, very quiet, and let all calls pass right through.

If you want to make Isolate a complete no-op in production, and your environment sets RACK_ENV, you could do something like this:

Isolate.gems "vendor/isolated" do
  passthrough { %w(beta production).include? ENV["RACK_ENV"] }

  # the rest of your gems...
end

…and nothing will get isolated. The block should evaluate to true if that’s what you want, and it’s only evaluated once. This is run really early, so don’t blindly assume things like the RAILS_ENV constant are set. Check your environment for details.

Options

Any trailing hash args to gem are passed to Gem::DependencyInstaller as options. There are two special exceptions, :source and :args.

# explicitly specify gem source
gem "jbarnette-johnson", :source => "http://gems.github.com"

# pass gem install args (the part after the '--')
gem "pg", :args => "ARCHFLAGS='-arch x86_64'"

Installing Isolated Gems

By default, Isolate will install and clean up your gems automatically. You can pass the :cleanup, :install, and :verbose options to control things:

# don't remove unnecesary gems
Isolate.gems "vendor/isolated", :cleanup => false do
  ...
end

# install, but quietly
Isolate.gems "vendor/isolated", :verbose => false do
  ...
end

# don't install
Isolate.gems "vendor/isolated", :install => false do
  ...
end

Interaction and Rake

You don’t strictly need them, but Isolate provides a set of Rake tasks that make a few common thing easier. To use them, just drop a require in your Rakefile:

require "isolate/rake"

Running Shell Commands

When you’re in an isolated subshell, the command-line tools provided by any of your gems are available on your PATH.

# run a single command in an isolated subshell
$ rake isolate:sh['gem list']

# run a new isolated subshell
$ rake isolate:sh

Exporting

Isolate can generate a .gems manifest file in the root directory of your project. .gems is used (among other things) to specify project dependencies on Heroku.

$ rake isolate:dotgems

A Rails Example

Here’s a quick example (extracted from a real project) of how to use Isolate with Rails. This project doesn’t use vendored Rails, and doesn’t want to depend on any system gems (except isolate, of course).

Gem dependencies are defined in config/preinitializer.rb. If you want, you could just as easily put them in config/{gems,deps,whatever}.rb, just make sure it’s loaded in the preinitializer:

require "rubygems"
require "isolate"

Isolate.gems "vendor/isolated" do
  gem "rails", "= 2.2.2"

  # async emails!
  gem "ar_mailer", "~> 1.3", '>= 1.3.3'

  # Facebook integration
  gem "facebooker", ">= 1.0.31"

  # Google contacts integration
  gem "gmail_contacts", "~> 1.7"

  # View templates
  gem "haml", "~> 2.0"

  # Session as model
  gem "intercession", "~> 1.0"

  # XML/HTML parsing in Facebooker and tests
  gem "nokogiri", ">= 1.2.3"

  # Twitter authentication
  gem "oauth", "~> 0.3"

  environment :cucumber, :development, :test do
    gem "cucumber"     # stories!
    gem "modelizer"    # easy model factories
    gem "sqlite3-ruby" # database support
    gem "vlad"         # deployment
    gem "webrat"       # integration tests
  end
end

Since this is in the preinitializer, Isolate will install and activate the all gems before Rails loads. The current environment is determined by looking at the ISOLATE_ENV, RAILS_ENV, or RACK_ENV environment variable. If none are set, "development" is the default.

Pow. Isolated!

A Library Example

If you’re using Hoe to manage your library, you can use Isolate’s Hoe plugin to automatically install your lib’s development, runtime, and test dependencies without polluting your system RubyGems, and run your tests/specs in total isolation.

Assuming you have a recent Hoe and isolate’s installed, it’s as simple as putting:

Hoe.plugin :isolate

before the Hoe.spec call in your Rakefile.

If you’re not using Hoe, you can just do a regular Isolate.gems block at the top of your Rakefile.

Installation

$ gem install isolate

License

Copyright 2009 John Barnette, et al. ([email protected])

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.