Tuesday, November 04, 2008

A first time gem creator's addendum

I recently started researching how to create Ruby Gems because I was working on on a Ruby application that is a reference application for accessing our production system at work, and I wanted to make the specific access code for our production system a Gem in Ruby so that I could just hand it off to future clients who want to integrate with Ruby. Further to that end, I read about the Newgem gem, and so I decided to use it, since it had recently hit 1.0.1. You can read the documentation there, so I won't repeat it here, but there's a couple of things you should do, prior to following their instructions.

  1. Set a 'HOME' environment variable if you're using Windows (as I am)

  2. gem install cucumber newgem

  3. rake config_hoe


The first step is to install newgem, but to also ensure that cucumber is installed as well because it's an unlisted dependency. The second step is to ensure that there's a basic .hoerc file created in your home directory that's ready to go whenever you want to run any tasks on your gem while testing / packaging it. I'm guessing it's automatically created in Linux, but I had to manually set the 'HOME' environment variable and run the configuration task myself in order to have the proper configuration file generated for me to run the tasks for creating and testing my gem.

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