http://www.hollandonrails.nl/articles/514-Bundler-1-0-without-system-gems The last time I talked about bundler I showed how to use the 0.9 series and everything will be in it's own bundler bubble. However, starting from bundler 1.0 systems gems will be prefered with sudo installs and this might be not what you want. Some perfectly valid reasons might be: * You are deploying to webservers as an unprivileged user and don't want to sudo * You don't want the existing apps to break because incompatible gems are being installed I was looking at the bundler source code for a solution and found out it was actually quite easy to solve. Just add a path after "bundle install" ! So when installing an application on a production server you can let capistrano (or whatever you use for deployments) run the following command: bundle install ~/.bundle Inside the application a config file will be created and respected. This configuration file consists of the following content: <code> --- BUNDLE_DISABLE_SHARED_GEMS: "1" BUNDLE_PATH: /Users/wijnandwiersma/.bundle </code> As long as this configuration exists the system gems will not be touched. Until recently I wasn't a big fan of bundler but because of "this presentation":http://vimeo.com/12614072 I fully understand all decisions that made bundler the way it is. I think you should watch it too. I think I will convert some rails 2.3 apps in the near future.