Gem Crafting With Jeweler

A few days ago I was just wondering what the best way to craft a
Gem was, and I figured out it doesn’t really matter. Any way you take will lead you to the same place, yet,
I really liked an special way to do it: I found JEWELER.
In short, Jeweler is a GEM to make GEMS, great, right?

Its quite simple to use, you just need to follow a few steps to get the skeleton
of a GEM and then you will get it ready to use.

The greatest stuff about Jeweler is that you have a library to manage and release
RubyGem projects. Don’t forget to create
your account on the RubyGems website, that will be your signature like a gem crafter.

You can also use its scaffold generator to start a new RubyGem project.

We need to use RubyGems to install JEWELER and get started:

$ gem install jeweler

Now with JEWELER installed we are ready to start building our own

$ jeweler <my-gem-name>

for instance:

$ jeweler My-Gem

You’ll get this output:

create  .gitignore
create  Rakefile
create  Gemfile
create  LICENSE.txt
create  README.rdoc
create  .document
create  lib
create  lib/My-Gem.rb   #Here you need to put your code
create  test       #Here you need to put your Unit Test code
create  test/helper.rb
create  test/test_My-Gem.rb

This means now you have the skeleton for your gems in the My-Gem directory.

If you want to see the JEWELER command options just run jeweler –help

Then we need rake command to interact with our gems

This step is really important because with this you can generate and validate
the gemspec, release the gem, run its test suite, display the current version, etc.

$ rake -T

  rake build              # Build gem into pkg
  rake clobber_rcov       # Remove rcov products for rcov
  rake clobber_rdoc       # Remove rdoc products
  rake console[script]    # Start IRB with all runtime dependencies loaded
  rake gemcutter:release  # Release gem to Gemcutter
  rake gemspec            # Generate and validate gemspec
  rake gemspec:debug      # Display the gemspec for debugging purposes, as jeweler
  rake gemspec:generate   # Regenerate the gemspec on the filesystem
  rake gemspec:release    # Regenerate, validate gemspec.
  rake gemspec:validate   # Validates the gemspec on the filesystem
  rake git:release        # Tag and push release to git.
  rake install            # Build and install gem using `gem install`
  rake rcov               # Analyze code coverage with tests
  rake rdoc               # Build the rdoc HTML Files
  rake release            # Release gem
  rake rerdoc             # Force a rebuild of the RDOC files
  rake test               # Run tests
  rake version            # Displays the current version
  rake version:bump:major # Bump the major version by 1
  rake version:bump:minor # Bump the a minor version by 1
  rake version:bump:patch # Bump the patch version by 1
  rake version:write      # Writes out an explicit version.

Now we need to set a version before we start using it

$ rake version:write MAJOR=1 MINOR=0 PATCH=0

The small explanation for this is: if you do a small change you need to
increase PATCH (0 – 9) then you will start to increase MINOR (0 – 9) stage, and
when you get MAJOR changes, its because you did a whole new version of your gem.

You will see this message:

Updated version: 1.0.0

Then, we need to edit our Rakefile and change a couple of lines inside, I suggest to you use VIM/MVIM/GVIM to do that:

$ vim Rakefile

If your gems depends upon other libraries, you’ll need to define a specification, commonly called a “gemspec”.

Inside Rakefile look for “gems” and that is the Gem Specification Reference.

Here you need to change:

$ gem.summary = %Q{TODO: summary here about your gem}
$ gem.description = %Q{TODO: longer description of your gem}

to this:

$ gem.summary = %Q{Writte a summary here about your gem}
$ gem.description = %Q{Writte a longer description of your gem}

After this, we’ll install our gems locally and so, we can start testing it:

$ rake install

If later you want to release your gem into www.rubygems.org you just need to run the command:

$ rake release

This will automatically:
* Generate My-Gem.gemspec and commit it
* Use git to tag v1.0.0 and push it
* Build My-Gem-1.0.0.gem and push it to rubygems.org

Conclusions

Now you to know about use jeweler, use it and see how this works, its
not the only way to do a gem, it just works for me, but you can find your own way to do
it however you feel more confortable.

Make your gem and release it to RubyGems, everybody is waiting for your sexy gems to
make their developer life easier.

“Easy way to make yours owns gems (FEB). Faster, Easy and Beautiful”

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