Pack

Pack is a Rust-powered Ruby package manager and Rails workflow CLI.

It keeps common gem-facing commands close together, adds project and Rails helpers, and aims to cut the usual Ruby CLI startup drag without changing the way Ruby developers already work.

• Website: https://blu3ph4ntom.github.io/pack/
• Docs: https://blu3ph4ntom.github.io/pack/docs/
• Releases: https://github.com/Blu3Ph4ntom/pack/releases

Install

Direct binary (no Ruby required)

# Linux / macOS
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Blu3Ph4ntom/pack/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

# Windows PowerShell
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "iwr https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Blu3Ph4ntom/pack/main/scripts/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | iex"

Both installers verify the binary against SHA256SUMS from the GitHub release.

RubyGems wrapper

gem install pack-rb
pack --help

pack-rb installs the pack launcher. On first run it downloads the matching Pack binary for the current platform from GitHub Releases and verifies it against SHA256SUMS.

gem install pack-rb is effectively the last gem command you need for installing Pack itself.

From source

cargo build --release
target/release/pack --help

What ships today

• RubyGems-compatible commands for install, list, env, uninstall, outdated, cleanup, and global update
• Native RubyGems.org registry reads for search and info
• Gemfile editing with pack add and pack remove
• Lockfile generation with pack generate
• Dependency inspection with pack why
• Direct executable dispatch with pack exec
• Rails helpers including pack server, pack console, pack test, pack r-spec, pack db, pack assets, pack cache, pack rails, and pack rake
• Task execution through Packfile
• pack update for project gems and pack update --global for globally installed gems
• pack upgrade for upgrading Pack through RubyGems or the direct binary installer
• Plugin management through pack plugins

Benchmarks

The repo only advertises numbers that were measured locally or reported directly by Criterion.

Command comparisons

Command	Pack	Comparison target
pack --version	32.20 ms	bundle --version at 368.24 ms
pack list	16.95 ms	gem list at 496.37 ms

Parser timings

Benchmark	Result	Source
Gemfile parse (100 deps)	8.67–8.86 µs	cargo bench --bench gemfile_parse
Lockfile parse (50 gems)	48.45–50.08 µs	cargo bench --bench gemfile_parse
Lockfile parse (200 gems)	91.60–117.35 µs	cargo bench --bench lockfile_bench

Release model

Releases are driven from .github/workflows/release.yml.

On each version tag, the workflow:

1. runs workspace tests
2. builds the pack-rb gem
3. builds platform binaries for Linux, Windows, and macOS
4. publishes a GitHub Release with binaries plus SHA256SUMS
5. publishes pack-rb to RubyGems

Local verification

cargo test --workspace --quiet
cargo build --release -p pack-cli
cd web && npm install && npm run build
cd gems/pack-rb && gem build pack-rb.gemspec

Repository layout

• crates/pack-cli — CLI entry point
• crates/pack-gemfile — Gemfile and lockfile parsing
• crates/pack-registry — RubyGems.org registry access
• crates/pack-installer — install orchestration
• crates/pack-exec — execution and plugin support
• gems/pack-rb — RubyGems wrapper package
• web/ — website and docs

License

MIT