Yesterday I had no money to go out and the weather sucked. So I decided to pick up one of my side projects and hack for a while.
For that project I need to fundamental components, a way of extracting keywords in a text and a wrapper for the public rss feeds of delicious.com. So I created webtagger and deliruby (this morning I thought to rename it to "delirious", which is cooler, but, well, nevermind) and released them as opensource gems for whomever wants to to hack them and use them. I think it's cool to be able to release something easy to use for others (using gem install instead of downloading the source, extracting it, installing it and all that fuzz).
So, how do you create a gem?
Easy! I used jeweler to create the gem skeleton and manage it and rubygems.org to host it, and here's how:
- Create your gem with
jeweler your-gem - Edit the
Rakefileto add the description and dependencies - Write some tests in the
test/dir or start coding in thelib/dir. - If you want to provide a binary executable, just add it in the
bin/dir and declare it in the Rakefile withgem.executables << your-bin-name - When you're ready to deploy the first version, just run
rake version:bump:minor(more on major-minor-patch versioning here ) - Then, run
rake buildto create the gemspec (your-gem.gemspec) and the gem itself (will be created in apkgdirectory). cdtopkgand simply rungem pushthe.gemfile for the version you're releasing and you're done!
Keep in mind that you need to be subscribed to rubygems.org -don't worry, it's free- and have a version of rubygem greater or equal to 1.3.7