Ruby on Rails gem dir permission in a production environment

Question

Im deploying a Ruby on Rails 2.3.8 app using Nginx and Passenger. I am not using Ruby Version Manager (RVM), although I might use it in the future. Im using bundler for gem management. I created a user named deploy, I use him to pull all the changes from my github repo, execute the migrations and restart the app using "touch tmp/restart".

Should I use the "deploy" user without using "sudo" for installing new gems? Should I use "sudo"? Which permissions should I apply in the gems dir folder?

Answer 1

If I were you, I would just use sudo to install the gems on the production server. You'll need to reinstall gems when you switch to RVM anyway; you might as well have gems you install in the meantime available to all users, and the way to do that is to install them with sudo.