How to refer a local gem in ruby?

I pack some ruby code into a gem. I want to refer the code in the gem in some other code. So in the Gemfile I specify the gem's name, version, and local path. Like:

gem 'gemname','0.x', :path => 'RELATIVE_PATH_TO_GEM_FILE'

After bundle install, I see

Using gemname (0.x) from source at RELATIVE_PATH_TO_GEM_FILE

But when I run the code, it can开发者_运维问答't find the code in the gem. LOAD_PATH shows ABSOLUTE_PATH_TO_GEM_FILE/lib.

No wonder it can't find the code, there's only gem file under ABSOLUTE_PATH_TO_GEM_FILE. it's not unpacked. So there's no lib directory.

if I gem install that gem file into my system, then all works fine. I can see the gem file was unpacked into source code files. But my question is if it can refer the local gem file directly somehow?

No, you can't refer to a .gem file directly.

In your terminology, you need to use an "unpacked" gem.

:path => '/foo/bar/'

where /foo/bar/ is a (gem) directory with lib/, etc.

We made a local (not system-wide) gems location. We set these environment variables:

GEM_HOME=/path/to/rubygems-1.3.4
RUBYLIB=/path/to/rubygems-1.3.4/lib/

By setting those, we can then do 'gem install ...' to put the built gem into that directory, and ruby knows where to find them.