# Bundler

12 Hacker News commenters recommended Bundler and 8 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a practical Ruby dependency manager that is useful for scripts and projects, though critics say installs are slow.

## Why people recommend it

- Useful for Ruby scripts and projects (2 comments): "In Ruby, there is inline bundler which makes sharing a single Ruby script very portable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46258521)) "looks useful, thanks for posting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913882))

## What people warn about

- Slow installs (2 comments): "it certainly isn't snappy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461158)) "`bundle install` is the overwhelming majority of the duration of `rails new`." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46458931))
- Quirky behavior compared to venvs (2 comments): "behaves in even stranger ways than venvs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50309239)) "I'm that way with Ruby/Bundler." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033325))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Nix](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nix.md): 378 recommend
- [Homebrew](https://hackerapproved.com/p/homebrew.md): 271 recommend
- [npm](https://hackerapproved.com/p/npm.md): 161 recommend
- [pnpm](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pnpm.md): 124 recommend
- [Cargo](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cargo.md): 123 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Bundler", https://hackerapproved.com/p/bundler/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).