Isolate is a very simple RubyGems sandbox. It restricts GEM_PATH and GEM_HOME, and provides a DSL for expressing your code's runtime Gem dependencies. While Isolate doesn't make any assumptions about what sort of code you're writing, it was extracted from a few Rails apps, so it's naturally going to be most useful with stuff like Rails, Merb, or Sinatra. Isolate is very, very, very stupid simple. For a much more full-featured Gem bundler, check out Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche's Bundler[http://github.com/wycats/bundler]: It does a lot of fancy AOT dependency resolution, supports non-gem resources, and is probably a better fit for you. For a widely used Gem manager and installer, check out Chad Wooley's GemInstaller[http://geminstaller.rubyforge.org]. YMMV, but I haven't tried Isolate with anything older than RubyGems 1.3.5.