Rubygems are the awesome way of distributing your code to others. GitHub is the awesome way of managing the source code of your project. GitHub can even generate a Rubygem if you include a gemspec.
Trouble is when developing your Rubygems on GitHub, you generally do one of the following:
- Manage the gemspec by hand
- ... why bother doing something by hand when you can automate it?
- Write your own Rake stuff to create the Gem::Specification and output it to a gemspec file, and deal with keeping the Rakefile and gemspec in sync
- ... why keep reinventing the wheel?
- Use hoe or echoe for generating the gemspec
- ... why use utilities made for the days before GitHub existed?
- ... why have extra stuff you aren't going to use?
Jeweler was created with a few goals in mind:
- Only use a Gem::Specification as configuration
- Be one command away from version bumping and releasing
- Store version information in one place
- Only concern itself with git, gems, and versioning
- Not be a requirement for using your Rakefile (you just wouldn't be able to use its tasks)
- Use Jeweler internally. Oh the meta!
Run the following if you haven't already:
gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
Install the gem:
sudo gem install technicalpickles-jeweler
Armed with the gem, we can begin diving into an example. the-perfect-gem was setup as a Jeweler showcase, and a simple example:
begin
require 'jeweler'
Jeweler::Tasks.new do |s|
s.name = "the-perfect-gem"
s.summary = "TODO"
s.email = "josh@technicalpickles.com"
s.homepage = "http://github.com/technicalpickles/the-perfect-gem"
s.description = "TODO"
s.authors = ["Josh Nichols"]
end
rescue LoadError
puts "Jeweler not available. Install it with: sudo gem install technicalpickles-jeweler -s http://gems.github.com"
end
Here's a rundown of what's happening:
- Wrap everything in a begin block, and rescue from LoadError
- This lets us degrade gracefully if jeweler isn't installed
- Make a new
Jeweler::Tasks
- It gets yielded a new
Gem::Specification
- This is where all the configuration happens
- Things you definitely need to specify:
name
- Things you probably want to specify:
summary
email
homepage
description
authors
- Things you can specify, but have defaults
files
, defaults toFileList["[A-Z]*.*", "{bin,generators,lib,test,spec}/**/*"]
- Things you shouldn't specify:
version
, because Jeweler takes care of this for you- Other things of interest
executables
, if you have any scriptsadd_dependency
, if you have any dependencies- Keep in mind that this is a
Gem::Specification
, so you can do whatever you would need to do to get your gem in shape
- It gets yielded a new
Before proceeding, take a minute to setup your git environment, specifically your name, email address, and GitHub username
$ git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com
$ git config --global user.name 'John Doe'
$ git config --global github.user johndoe
$ git config --global github.token 55555555555555
Jeweler provides a generator of sorts, jeweler
. It requires only argument, the name of a repo you want to create. It also takes a few options: --shoulda and --bacon. These control what type of tests are created, with the default being shoulda.
$ jeweler --create-repo the-perfect-gem
Basically, this does:
- Creates the the-perfect-gem directory
- Seeds it with some basic files:
.gitignore
, with the usual suspects predefinedRakefile
, setup with tasks for jeweler, test, rdoc, and rcovREADME
, with your project nameLICENSE
, MIT, with your name prefilledtest/test_helper
, setup with shoulda, mocha, and a re-openedTest::Unit::TestCase
test/the_perfect_gem.rb
, placeholder failing testlib/the_perfect_gem.rb
, placeholder library file- Makes it a git repo
- Sets up
git@github.com:johndoe/jeweler.git
as theorigin
git remote - Makes an initial commit
- Sets up a new repository on GitHub and pushes to it (omit --create-repo to skip this)
You also probably should enable RubyGem creation for you repository: Go to your project's edit page and check the 'RubyGem' box.
Here's the general idea:
- Hack, commit, hack, commit, etc, etc
- Version bump
- Release
- Have a delicious scotch
The hacking and the scotch are up to you, but Jeweler provides rake tasks for the rest.
Versioning information is stored in VERSION.yml
. It's a plain ol' YAML file which contains three things:
- major
- minor
- patch
Consider, for a second, 1.5.3
.
- major = 1
- minor = 5
- patch = 3
When you first start using Jeweler, there won't be a VERSION.yml
, so it'll assume 0.0.0.
If you need some arbitrary version, you can do one of the following:
rake version:write MAJOR=6 MINOR=0 PATCH=3
- Write
VERSION.yml
by hand (lame)
You have a few rake tasks for doing the version bump:
$ rake version:bump:patch # 1.5.1 -> 1.5.2
$ rake version:bump:minor # 1.5.1 -> 1.6.0
$ rake version:bump:major # 1.5.1 -> 2.0.0
If you need to do an arbitrary bump, use the same task you used to create VERSION.yml
:
$ rake version:write MAJOR=6 MINOR=0 PATCH=3
The process of version bumping does a commit to your repo, so make sure your repo is in a clean state (ie nothing uncommitted).
It's pretty straight forward:
$ rake release
This takes care of:
- Generating a
.gemspec
for you project, with the version you just bumped to - Commit and push the updated
.gemspec
- Create a tag
- Push the tag
How do you know when your gem is built? Has My Gem Built Yet was specifically designed to answer that question.
If it happens to be down, you can also check out the GitHub Gem repo's list. Just search for youname-yourrepo.s
<hack, hack, hack, commit>
$ rake version:bump:patch release
Now browse to http://gems.github.com/yourname/yourproject, and wait for it to be built.