There’s a little known feature of Bundler that allows you to use a local Git repository while developing locally, and a remote Git repo when deploying. This feature means that you no longer have to constantly switch between local paths:
gem 'spree', :path => "~/Projects/gems/spree"
And remote paths:
gem 'spree', :github => 'spree/spree', :branch => 'master'
How does it work?
Well, what you can do instead is tell Bundler that you have a local copy of this repository by running a command like this in your terminal:
bundle config local.spree ~/Projects/gems/spree
Then in your Gemfile whenever you reference a Git repo for this gem, like this…
gem 'spree', :github => 'spree/spree', :branch => 'master'
Bundler will use the local copy. When you deploy this application to your server, because the server is not configured to use a local copy of the repo, it will use the proper repo from GitHub.
For more information, check out the Bundler documentation page, under “Local Git Repos”.
Thanks to Phil Arndt who first showed me this trick many moons ago.