I’m very new to RoR. In fact, I still don’t have Rails or my DB set up yet. But I see that there is a lot of ‘auto-install’ with RoR, where Bundler or something ‘goes out to the net’ and grabs what it needs. I have a problem with that because that is not my setup. See, I thought a lot about security a long time ago and concluded the most secure connection to the net is to not have one. So I don’t. I have a connection on a separate laptop, then I manually move install packages to my main machine and unpack there (both Windows). That has worked well for installing Ruby and the basic Rubygems, but I feel I am going down a black hole here. How do I manage my Gems myself without a connection…or will this take the rest of my life?
Bundler is a package manager and ensures that the gems you need are present in development, staging, and production. It is an important component of Rails applications, so it might be worth reading up a little on why it exists and how it works.
http://bundler.io/rationale.html
Theoretically you can download and install them manually, but you will be fighting an uphill battle.
I too, am relatively security conscious. I have one PC which is not connected to the internet (and never has been) for storing personal information and one PC which is connected for dev work, surfing and the like. Otherwise things like managing Ruby gems quickly become a nightmare.
mmm…I was afraid you were going to say that. 
Yes, in days past one of the BIG headaches was dealing with dependencies and versioning.
A lot of error messages, and a lot of gem install in the CLI
IMHO best to take advantage of the improvements
Just to bang the point home, this morning I had to make a few minor changes to a rails app that I hadn’t touched for ages.
I tried running rails s and got a load of warnings about missing gems and mismatched gem versions (including rails).
I then ran bundle update, bundler went of and fetched everything I needed in the correct version and in about 45 seconds I was good to go. Had I had to do that by hand, it would have been a morning wasted (if I was lucky).
If you are particularly security conscious, or you are worried about the latency in talking to rubygems website, you can also install a local mirror of the whole site, which is done at some coding camps I’ve been to where they have no internet connection
I gave up. I’ll just work from a cloud account.
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