I find it annoying when I switch to a new branch on a repo and have to remember which dependencies and install steps I need to do. For example, in our react_on_rails gem repo, I have to remember to cd into spec/dummy, bundle install, and then also npm install. Okay not a big deal, but we could easily put that step into a little script.
Would another option be to write a rake task that does something similar and run it from a binstub? That way the script is application-dependent and automatically included when you clone the repo, not something you have to download separately. I haven’t gotten that granular with my rake tasks, but it seems like something you should be able to do.
Well you could write your shell script to point to run the rake task, but the idea is that you use a consistent scheme across all projects, some of which may not even be ruby projects. The scripts should still be application-dependent and included with the repo regardless though.