Here’s a bash function to vendor gems in your Rails app.

Usage:

vg <gem name> [gem version]

This will install the gem in your ./vendor/gems directory, without installing documentation or dependencies. The version can be specific (i.e. 2.4.3) or minimal (i.e. “>= 2.4”).

Add the following to your ~/.profile:

function vg {
  if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "Usage: vg  [gem version]"
  fi
  opts="--install-dir=vendor/gems --no-rdoc --no-ri --ignore-dependencies"
  if [ -n "$2" ]; then
    opts="--version $2 $opts"
  fi
  gem install $1 $opts
}

[Update: January 26, 2013] In an effort to avoid leaving orphaned  posts all over the web, I’ve consolidated everything to a single blog at http://rob.by.

For the latest version of this post, please visit: http://rob.by/2013/remove-merged-branches-from-git.