answer of this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68860954/use-a-gem-in-rails-locally-without-forcing-it-on-collaborators

answer-question-use-a-gem-in-rails-.mdlocally-without-forcing-it-on-collaborators.md

Perhaps talking to them and explain your point of view. Try to present the benefits you think you can get with rails panel. I think all will learn in the discussion.

But if you want to, I tested here and this works:

# in your Gemfile

# double exclamation (!!) point just to ensure to return a bool
gem 'meta_request', require: !!ENV['APP_WITH_RAILS_PANEL']

After that, perform a bundle install. Here, all people will have to install rails_panel, but if they want to use, just:

APP_WITH_RAILS_PANEL=1 bundle exec rails s

When the rails server boot, it will read the Gemfile and will see that it has to require the rails_panel gem. It will load fine.

If you don't want to pass the ENV var every time, you can export from your $HOME/.bashrc, and everytime you open a shell it will already be there, by running:

echo 'export APP_WITH_RAILS_PANEL=1' >> $HOME/.bashrc