The information in this post comes from my experiments, and from the bundler documentation.
bundle package:
- installs gems into vendor/cache/ relative to your Gemfile
- uses your local gems as source if they’re already there
- will automatically update when you use other gem commands
- future invocations of bundle install will use the packaged gems, rather than connecting to rubygems.org
bundle install –path:
- installs into the path you specify
- fetches fresh versions from rubygems initially
- the specified path will be used to store the gems for future invocations
- future bundle installs will check rubygems.org
The difference seems pretty subtle to me – both options work, but bundle package is definitely way faster to run.