Question

I started developing ruby lately and I really like it, But I feel somehow lost. I developed a script that does “whatever” and that scripts requires many gems like nokogiri and colorize. I now want to deploy the script, so after reading a while I found many people saying that deploying as a gem is the best approach. So my question is simple? Is there any tool that I can use to create a gem of my script file and include all the gem dependencies(nokogiri) in the new gem?

I am using ubuntu!

Thanks alot

Answer 1

Building a gem consists of basically creating a simple directory structure for your script, and a special file known as a gemspec that will list all its dependencies. That gemspec can be used with rubygems to create a gem file (*.gem), which can be installed using rubygems or uploaded to rubygems.org for public consumption.

There are several tools that automate part of this process. A relatively simple one is the Bundler gem, which will both take care of dependencies during development, and make it easy for you to package your gem. This article contains enough information to get you started with gem development using bundler.