This is the code I use to set up a new Ruby Gem.
Github and Rubygems.org make it ridiculously easy to share your code using Gems. Sometimes I have something small and useful I'd like to make a gem, but I'm too lazy to set up all the packaging boilerplate, and I prefer not to introduce tools like Jewler or Hoe just to manage a gemspec, which is a trivially easy file to maintain. Setting up a new gem is boring, so I spent a couple hours putting this together as a reusable gem. If you like it, please feel free to use it for whatever purpose you choose. Bug fixes, and patches are of course welcome.
gem install gem_init
gem_init hello_world
A brief summary of some of the quirkiness is below:
These are read from your ~/.gitconfig
if available and used to populate some
basic info in the gemspec.
This is the license I almost always use for my open source work, so it's the default.
I prefer not to check my Gemfiles into git, because I usually tweak it a lot when testing against lots of different versions of my dependencies. So I usually just add a Gemfile.default with something that should work, and copy that to Gemfile before working.
The only thing added by default to the Gemfile is your generated library itself,
which is an easy way to avoid messing around with the LOAD_PATH
in your test
setup.
I am assuming Bundler version 1.0.x, which you can currently get by doing
gem install bundler --pre
But by the time you're reading this, it may already be the current stable release.
This just adds a test
method to the Module
class, so you can write
declarative tests:
test "something should do something" do
assert_equal foo, bar
end
Having this as a class method in Module
means you can write your unit tests in
either modules or classes. Being able to group related tests in modules and give
them declarative names for me is "good enough" to make up for Test::Unit's
ugliness, and I like the fact that it's just plain old Ruby.
I tend to do this rather than use a bigger test framework, because it introduces less dependencies and makes it very easy for people to just check out my gem and run my tests with the minimum of effort.
Rather than manually specifying everything, I just pull the files I want to add to the gem out of the list of files added to Git. This works fine most of the time, with the only caveat being that you need to have your stuff in Git before building your gem, or using the directory as a gem via Bundler.
This adds a soft dependency on Yard; the task is added only if you have it installed.
Otherwise, by default a gem
method is added to package your gem, and a clean
method is there to tidy up your repository.
By default, I ignore Gemfile, Gemfile.lock, pkg and doc directories. Obviously you can and should change this to whatever makes sense for you.
I like to use Markdown for my README files, as it plays nicely with Yard.