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ruby-on-railsrubyrubygemsminimize

Which gems can a Rails app survive without?

  • actionmailer
  • actionpack
  • activeresource
  • activesupport

I have a basic scaffolded CRUD app that uses ActiveRecord to connect to a SQLite database and I have frozen my Rails gems.

Which of these gems could I delete without affecting my app?

Solution

  • ActionMailer can go if you'll never use e-mail, and ActiveResource is just a more REST-ful API to Rails than ActiveRecord is. You'll need the rest:

    • ActionPack handles the split of web requests to controllers and views
    • ActiveSupport puts a lot of mixins and syntactic sugar from Ruby into Rails

    But more importantly, why do you need to delete the gems? It's not like they take up a lot of space.