Using different gem dependencies in a ruby gem - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am using a hand crafted gem in my Rails application which itself has a dependency to a Gem i need to replace for Ruby version >= 2.0.
I found a nice way to inject dependencies dynamically by using Gem extensions.
Installing my gem with sudo gem install ... works just fine, dependencies will be installed according to my ruby version conditional inside mkrf_conf.rb:
require 'rubygems/dependency_installer'
di = Gem::DependencyInstaller.new
if RUBY_VERSION < '2.0'
puts "Using vanilla httpclient because of Ruby #{RUBY_VERSION}"
di.install 'httpclient', '2.3.3'
else
# https://github.com/nahi/httpclient/pull/163
puts "Using patched httpclient by glebtv because of Ruby #{RUBY_VERSION}"
di.install 'glebtv-httpclient', '3.2.7'
end
puts "Writing fake Rakefile"
# Write fake Rakefile for rake since Makefile isn't used
File.open(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'Rakefile'), 'w') do |f|
f.write("task :default" + $/)
end
I'm using this gem inside my Rails app (plain reference inside the Gem file). I'm not using rvm on my development VM, all gems reside in the system gem path. Usually, bundler asks for a sudo password (running Ubuntu) when it installs new gems. When I'm trying to bundle now, bundler fails building the native gem extensions due to insufficiant permissions:
Gem::Ext::BuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/usr/local/bin/ruby mkrf_conf.rb
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/package.rb:359:in `initialize': Permission denied - /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/httpclient-2.3.3/bin/httpclient (Errno::EACCES)
I'm absolutely clueless how to avoid running bundler with sudo. As far as I understand from reading bundler's source, bundler should detect if sudo is necessary when installing new gems. But I'm also using gems in my project that have native C extensions (nokogiri, mysql2, ...) and those will be built correctly. Also, the bundler man page states that starting bundler with sudo bundle is something that is to be avoided.
Is the way I'm trying to inject dependencies into my Gem depending on the Ruby version not the way-to-go?
Any hint or help is really appreciated.

Answer 1

the problem is that you install your gem with sudo (super user permission) then you cannot access it, use RVM and install the gems without sudo it will solve your problem.