Rails optional gem config

Question

What do you do when you want to use a gem for development/testing that you don't want to force other devs to use? Right now I have

begin
  require 'redgreen'
rescue LoadError
end

in test_helper.rb and no gem config, but that seems like a clumsy approach, albeit a functional one. I'd like to do something like the following:

config.gem "redgreen", :optional => true

Any other suggestions? Or should I just vendor those pretty superficial gems...?

EDIT

To be clear, I am only talking about those specific gems, like redgreen, which aren't actually used in the functional code, but only in the coding process. There is no need to vendor these at all, except to avoid the conditional require.

Answer 1

If you want it to be optional, it's better to freeze the gem as a plugin. However, it's not a good idea to use different gems than the rest of a development team, as it creates some inconsistencies in the codebase that can be hard to track down later. I would say add it to config.gem, and just tell the other developers to do:

rake gems:install

And you're done.