Different Ways to Run the Rails Command

There are different ways to run Rails:

• rails
• bin/rails
• bundle exec rails

Which one should you use?

rails is the command installed by Bundler. It's located where Bundler installs the railties gem, within the bindir subfolder "exe", and is the exe/rails command. When you have installed Rails but and need to set up a new Rails app with the rails new command, you'll need to use the rails command.

bin/rails is the command installed by Rails when you create a new app. It's a binstub generated from a Rails template which produces a file called bin/rails within your Rails app directory. The command line examples in the Rails Guides use bin/rails. And it is recommended to use bin/rails over rails:

Beginning in Rails 4, Rails ships with a rails binstub at ./bin/rails that
should be used instead of the Bundler-generated rails binstub.

bundle exec rails executes the rails command in a way where all gems specified in the Gemfile available to require. Using bin/rails also does this and loads the gems when config/boot.rb requires bundler/setup.

To create a new app use rails. From that point on, use bin/rails.