What are the steps needed to create and publish a rubygem of your own?

Question

So you've created a ruby library.

How do you create and publish your rubygem? And what common pitfalls and gotchas are there pertaining to creating and publishing rubygems?

Answer 1

There are several tools to help you build your own gems. hoe and newgem are the best-known, and have a lot of good qualities. However, hoe adds itself as a dependency to your gem, and newgem has become a very large tool, one that I find unwieldy when I want to create and deploy a gem quickly.

My favorite tool is Mr Bones by Tim Pease. It’s lightweight, featureful, and does not add dependencies to your project. To create a project with it, you just run bones <my_project_name> on the command line, and a skeleton is built for you, complete with a lib directory for your code, a bin directory for your tools, and a test directory. The configuration is in a Rakefile, and it’s clear and concise. Here's the configuration for a project I did a few months ago:

load 'tasks/setup.rb'

ensure_in_path 'lib'
require 'friend-feed'

task :default => 'test'

PROJ.name = 'friend-feed'
PROJ.authors = 'Clinton R. Nixon'
PROJ.email = 'crnixon@gmail.com'
PROJ.url = 'friend-feed.rubyforge.org'
PROJ.rubyforge_name = 'friend-feed'
PROJ.dependencies = ['json']
PROJ.version = FriendFeed::VERSION
PROJ.exclude = %w(.git pkg)

Mr Bones has the standard set of features you’d expect: you can use it to package up gems and tarfiles of your library, as well as release it on RubyForge and deploy your documentation there. Its killer feature, though, is its ability to freeze its skeleton in your home directory. When you run bones --freeze, a directory named .mrbones is copied into your home directory. You can edit the files in there to make a skeleton for your gems that works the way you work, and from then on, when you run bones to create a new gem, it will use your personal gem skeleton. You can unfreeze Mr Bones by running bones --unfreeze and your skeleton will be backed up, and the default skeleton will be used again.

(Editorial note: I wrote a blog post about this several months ago, and most of this is copied from it.)

Answer 2

I recommend github as a place to start, especially for open source projects.

Answer 3

And try a google search as well... Very first search result for me...

• http://www.5dollarwhitebox.org/drupal/creating_a_rubygem_package

Answer 4

You may also want to checkout the Hoe gem, which can automate the gem creation process.

See: http://nubyonrails.com/articles/tutorial-publishing-rubygems-with-hoe

Answer 5

I actually wrote a tutorial on exactly this, and I wrote it as I was learning. It's more focused on the game I'd written than a library. Also, it assumes you want to build the gem via rake rather than on your own:

• Part 1 on how to create the gem.
• Part 2 on how to run binaries installed by your gem, and get to resources.

Answer 6

hoe no longer adds itself as a dependency as off rubygems 1.2. Its rake tasks are focused on deployment of the rubygem to rubyforge. If you just want to serve the gem from github I think there some new hoe-esque rake task tools to help.