That's correct. You build the image and then run (from inside a container) bundle install. This mapped well with our current flow, where you need to run bundle install after fetching new code anyway. This way, when you fetch new code, you don't need to rebuild the image and launch new containers, unless something changes in the Dockerfile or the docker-compose.yml file. That now happens fairly rarely, and, when it does, it's a pretty quick process.

You don't have to run it at runtime, however, as the data volume for a container sticks around until the container has been deleted. If you don't delete the bundler-cache container, your bundler cache sticks around. If you want to clear the cache, just remove the container.

To add to silvamerica's comment, this process is specific to running containers in development. When building images for deployment the dependencies are installed as a RUN step in the Dockerfile.