GemRepublica

Ruby gems are great. The community of developers is nice. Contributions are welcome and efforts well-received.

With gemrepublica it becomes even easier to clone the code of a given gem and start hacking.

Similar Projects

I found out that most functionality is already made available to gem itself, realized with plugins (see http://guides.rubygems.org/plugins/). Let's see how we will consolidate this.

Installation

Install with:

    $ gem install gemrepublica

Usage

Currently, gemrepublica ships with a single executable,

gemrepublica

While gemrepublica --help will give you a basic help, you usually want to call it like

    $ gemrepublica <gem name> <location for clone>

This will clone the gems source (if it can be found) to the given location.

For example

    $ gemrepublica gemrepublica /home/fwolfst/dollies/

would create a git clone of this repository in /home/fwolfst/dollies/gemrepublica. It's as easy as that!

Now, why would create? I did not specify the source code link (see below, in Limitations section).

If you want to work with your private clone, remember that you can

    $ bundle exec bin/gemrepublica

To work with your copy rather than the installed version.

Rationale

You want to get coding in zero seconds.

Limitations

• Currently, gemrepublica only works if the source code link is specified by the maintainer on the rubygems.org homepage and if it points to a github repository.

• Currently, gemrepublica will only clone the HEAD of that github repository.

Unfortunately, the source code link on rubygems.org has to be specified via its interface. I proposed including it in the Gem-Specification, where I hope it will end one day - probably in the 'metadata' (see ruby/rubygems#1007).

I also proposed to consume this metadata key on the rubygems.org homepage (see rubygems/rubygems.org#718).

Naming

We are the people and own code! And create replica of gems easily.

Roadmap

• fix TODOs indicated in code comments.
• allow specification of version, check out that tag if existing.
• consider switching to thor or rake.
• play well with git repositories that are not on github.
• allow easy branch creation.
• play well with other VCS like svn or mercurial/hg.
• implement --fork switch.

Contributing

1. Mail me.
2. Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/gemrepublica/fork )
3. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
6. Create a new Pull Request