6Dec/090
Skipping gem documentation: configure .gemrc to speed up gem installation
The .gemrc file can specify default options for the 'gem' executable, and since I haven't ever looked up ri or rdoc on my local system, I decided to turn these off by default. I've been adding the '--no-ri' and '--no-rdoc' flags for a while, but my laziness just got the better of me.
Turning of the RI and Rdoc documentation speeds up gem installs. Here, installing capistrano without docs takes about 11 seconds, whereas installing the documenation more than doubles the time to about 24 seconds.
nicks-computer-3:snap nick$ time sudo gem install capistrano --no-ri --no-rdoc Successfully installed capistrano-2.5.10 1 gem installed real 0m11.480s user 0m7.262s sys 0m0.374s nicks-computer-3:snap nick$ time sudo gem install capistrano --ri --rdoc Successfully installed capistrano-2.5.10 1 gem installed Installing ri documentation for capistrano-2.5.10... Installing RDoc documentation for capistrano-2.5.10... real 0m23.974s user 0m18.956s sys 0m0.706s
If you want to turn off the documentation options, add this line to your ~/.gemrc file:
gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc
So that it looks something like this:
nicks-computer-3:snap nick$ cat ~/.gemrc --- :bulk_threshold: 1000 :backtrace: false gemcutter_key: XXXXX gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc :benchmark: false :verbose: true :update_sources: true :sources: - http://gems.rubyforge.org/ - http://gems.opscode.com