Question

Firstly, I’m not using rails. This is vanilla ruby application. I’ve read about packaging a CLI ruby application as a GEM.

So I guess my question would be, is this the ruby way? Does this layout lend itself to class autoloading?

I’m coming from a PHP background where I’m used to application layouts that adhere to PSR-0 style (see examples section).

Answer 1

Yes, the way to build and distribute a Ruby command-line app is more or less as that article describes:

• bin – exe goes here
• lib/your_app.rb – requires all files under lib/your_app
• lib/your_app/whatever.rb – modules and files to build your command-line app
• your_app.gemspec – gemspec; make sure you mention that there’s a bin file
• Rakefile – manage development
• test – yup, tests

It’s completely OK to break up your app into classes and modules inside lib. By distributing with RubyGems the command-line app will be in the user’s path and it will have access to everything in lib.

RubyGems has first-class support for distributing command-line apps; it’s not just for libraries.