Ever seen the error “You must use Bundler 2 or greater with this lockfile.” trying to build a Docker image from a Dockerfile that uses an older Ruby version? Even though you are gem installing the correct version of Bundler?

It turns out that the Ruby Docker images set an environment variable called BUNDLER_VERSION, which Bundler will always try to use to install dependencies when you run bundle install, even if a newer version has been installed. Even if you uninstall the old version, it will still not use the newer version. The solution is to prefix your RUN bundle install instruction with unset BUNDLER_VERSION. The full command that I am using to install the version of Bundler my Gemfile.lock was bundled with and then install my dependencies is:

RUN unset BUNDLER_VERSION &&\
    gem install bundler -v "$(grep -A 1 "BUNDLED WITH" Gemfile.lock | tail -n
    1)" &&\
    echo $(bundle --version) &&\
    bundle install

Note: I know that this affects the ruby:2.5 image (old, I know). While the problem might not cause an error in newer versions, the behaviour is the same

  • BUNDLER_VERSION is set, and the version specified by this environment variable will be used in preference to any other installed version. For this reason, it’s worth checking this, even on newer Ruby images, since dependencies may be installed with a different version of Bundler than you were expecting.

Follow-up: this works when building the image, but not when using bundle after that (it reverts to trying to use the old version). I tried a range of things to get this environment variable to persist, but export BUNDLER_VERSION doesn’t persist in the container, and putting the environment variable export in ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile only gets run when a shell is run - not when a standalone command (like bundle exec rails s --binding=0.0.0.0) is run. I ended up not being able to find a solution for this in the Dockerfile. Instead, I added a docker-entrypoint.sh script in the root of the project with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
set -Eeuo pipefail
# Use the version of Bundler specified in Gemfile.lock, not the one packaged
# with the original Docker image
export BUNDLER_VERSION="$(grep -A 1 "BUNDLED WITH" Gemfile.lock | tail -n 1)"
exec $@

And declaring this entrypoint in my Dockerfile: ENTRYPOINT ["docker-entrypoint.sh"]

This means that when my command is run, it will be passed to the entrypoint - e.g. docker-entrypoint.sh bundle exec rails s --binding=0.0.0.0, and will have the BUNDLER_VERSION environment variable exportd from within that script.