Unpacked gem in vendor/gems not in a versioned directory

Question

I unpacked a gem into my vendor/gems directory and tried to run my Rails app.

I got this message:

Unpacked gem in vendor/gems not in a versioned directory

I don't understand this error and judging by the Google search results for this error there are not many people who have experienced this problem.

Could this mean I also need to vendor Rails to use vendor/gems?

Answer 1

The much easier and more robust way is to use gem dependencies.

Then if you want to unpack your gems into vendor/gems its as easy as typing:

rake gems:unpack

You do not need to vendor rails in order to vendor gems, the error appears to be a user error you are decompressing the gem into the wrong location and missing some version info.

Answer 2

You don't need to vendor Rails to use vendor gems.

Normally gems unpack to a directory called something like vendor/gems/some_gem-1.2.3. Check that all your vendored gem directories follow this pattern (i.e. GEM_NAME-VERSION).

Answer 3

Did you do this manually or using rake? Since a gem in the vendor/gems directory has this format - gem-name-VERSION.

For example the ruby-openid gem will be unpacked to vendor/plugins/ruby-openid-2.1.7/.

Try using rake gems:unpack to unpack the gems.