Bundler
Ranked 22 of 35 package managers by recommenders
Recommended as a practical Ruby dependency manager that is useful for scripts and projects, though critics say installs are slow.
Recommended as a practical Ruby dependency manager that is useful for scripts and projects, though critics say installs are slow.
20 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 12
- criticize it
- 8
- approval share
- 60%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 12 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Useful for Ruby scripts and projects
“In Ruby, there is inline bundler which makes sharing a single Ruby script very portable.”
Comment from 13 Dec 2025 in “Using Python for Scripting” “looks useful, thanks for posting”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Dangers in Your Gemfile”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Slow installs
“it certainly isn't snappy”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “Can Bundler Be as Fast as Uv?” “`bundle install` is the overwhelming majority of the duration of `rails new`.”
Comment from 1 Jan 2026 in “Can Bundler Be as Fast as Uv?” Quirky behavior compared to venvs
“behaves in even stranger ways than venvs”
Comment from 30 Oct 2026 on Hacker News “I'm that way with Ruby/Bundler.”
Comment from 24 Nov 2025 in “Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected”
Other package managers people recommend
The four most recommended other package managers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 35 package managers, rankedWhat people said
16 of the 20 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“behaves in even stranger ways than venvs”
“which in turn can be traced back to Bundler”
“bundler and rubygems are being maintained ably, if not better, by hsbt”
“How is that not an easy exploit to circumvent the cooldown?”
“Imagine a statically compiled bundler that can also do the job of RVM”
“used their privileges as administrators of RubyGems.org to take over the `bundler` package”
“it certainly isn't snappy”
“I never found Bundler to be all that slow compared to other package managers.”
“`bundle install` is the overwhelming majority of the duration of `rails new`.”
“in general it's a bad idea unless you are diligent with git tag use”
“In Ruby, there is inline bundler which makes sharing a single Ruby script very portable.”
“"Bundler includes checksums in new lockfiles by default" is the thing I'm most excited about.”
“to a lesser extent Bundler and Rake are still the most ergonomic versions of tools in their class”
“I'm that way with Ruby/Bundler.”
“looks useful, thanks for posting”
“since Bundler knew how to resolve deps we should see what it uses”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.