On New Gems
November 1, 2011 § Leave a comment
One doesn’t go through the process of starting a new ruby gem all that often. Even if you have published a few, it is easy to forget how get one started. So here, for my benefit as much as anyone else’s, is a quick easy way to get a gem started and hosted on GitHub.
On the command line navigate to the directory you want to use to work on your different gems.
> cd ~/Projects/gems
I like using bundler, so this is what I do:
> bundle gem <gem name>
create <gem name>/Gemfile
create <gem name>/Rakefile
create <gem name>/.gitignore
create <gem name>/.gemspec
create <gem name>/lib/<gem name>.rb
create <gem name>/lib/<gem name>/version.rb
It will create a directory for you with the gem name and initialize a git repo for you with everything already staged to be committed. Now you need to create a new repo on GitHub. It’s pretty straight forward, so I’ll let GitHub’s on screen instructions take it from there. My only suggestion would be to make the project name the same as your gem name to avoid confusion.
Note: If you use dashes “-” instead of underscores “_” in your gem name, bundler will treat them as module hierarchies and build folders to accomodate.
Now cd into your new gem’s directory.
> cd <gem name>
Hook the git repo up with GitHub. The link should be shown on the empty repo’s main page. Just copy that.
> git remote add origin git@github.com:<GitHub username>/<GitHub Project Name>.git
Now commit your skeleton. Everything is already staged for you.
> git commit -m "Initial commit"
Now push it out to GitHub
> git push origin master
And just like that you are ready to start working on your new ruby gem. You’ll also want to remember the following commands:
> rake build # build <gem name>-<version> into pkg directory > rake install # build and install <gem name>-<version> on local machine > rake release # tags the repo with the version number and pushes new version out to RubyGems.org
Google will be able to tell you more about filling out the .gemspec file than I can. This is just to get you up and running.
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