I had typed “bundle exec” thousands of times, and I was so annoyed by the repetition that I was ready to slap my grandmother. But she’s a very nice lady, and that wouldn’t have helped. Instead, I added some bash aliases. Now I can type r s and bundler fires up my Rails development server. Everyone’s heard of bash aliases, but in my experience, few actually use them.
Here are my bundler aliases. Put them in your ~/.bash_aliases or ~/.bashrc file. They’ll load automatically every time you log in. (But until you log out and then back in, you’ll have to run source ~/.bash_aliases to load them.)
My ~/.bash_aliases file
alias b='bundle' alias be='bundle exec' alias bi='bundle install' # Even shorter! alias e='bundle exec' alias i='bundle install' # Get rid of rails and rake too! alias r='bundle exec rails' alias k='bundle exec rake'
In use
# "bundle exec rails s" now looks like be rails s # or the slightly briefer e rails s # or the megre r s
# "bundle exec rake db:migrate" now looks like be rake db:migrate # or the slightly briefer e rake db:migrate # or merely k db:migrate
Remember, you’re a programmer, and you should never type the same thing twice. Go forth and alias!