Question

I want to learn how to create a rubygem with a generator etc.

When I create a gem, do I create a separate project?

The reason being, since it will have generators and hook into the lifecycle of a Rails 3 application, I want to create a test rails 3 application at the same time to see how things are working etc.

Can someone outline what I should do to do this?

For example, I’m using git, so what I want to do is, when I run a generator for my gem and it doesn’t do what I want, I can then easily rollback to the previous version using git.

This will be a simple gem, just trying to get a feel for things and how I can hook into various parts of rails etc.

Answer 1

Use bundler to create the new Gem with the following command:

bundle gem foogem

Then go to the Gemfile of the application you’re going to use and add something like the following:

gem 'foogem', :path =>'/path/to/foogem'

In this way you can easily test your gem inside your rails project.