GitHub’s RubyGem Server

Update regarding require, please read below

The next time you visit your repository’s edit screen you’ll see a new checkbox that should be pretty exciting for users hosting their RubyGem project on GitHub:

After checking that, managing your gem is as simple as managing a gemspec in your project’s root directory (example). Anytime you push a modified gemspec to GitHub, we’ll build and publish a new gem for you.

Feel free to give your open source friends a hard time when they don’t release a new gem version for a while, because they have no excuse now 🙂

One concept regarding our server that bears repeating is that your gem will always be prefixed with your username. Installing mojombo’s grit gem is done via the following:

$ sudo gem install mojombo-grit
Successfully installed mojombo-grit-0.8.1

Using said gem works a couple of ways. First the regular require:

$ irb -rubygems
>> require 'grit'
=> true

Update: The following also works if you have competing versions of the same gem:

$ irb -rubygems
>> gem 'mojombo-grit'
=> true
>> require 'grit'
=> true

The namespacing may feel awkward as first, but it really lends itself to the distributed nature of the service we provide. Forking a RubyGem project shouldn’t be any more complicated than forking any other type of project.

Visit http://gems.github.com for all of the details. Enjoy!

Written by

PJ Hyett

@pjhyett