I just discovered the ruby-on-rails-gems tag (as opposed to the tags rubygems, gem, bundler, and ruby-on-rails-plugins).
Is there such a thing as a "Ruby on Rails gem", as opposed to an ordinary Ruby gem, apart from gems that merely have Rails or one of its components listed as a dependency?
It is a bad tag, it seems like it is mostly used by newbies, and it is usually paired with rubygems (which makes sense). Going through and removing the tags, only 64 questions, so it shouldn't take that long.
EDIT
Done. Not sure how SO works with this, but it doesn't seem to come in up autocomplete anymore. Some questions were literally tagged ruby-on-rails ruby-on-rails-3 ruby ruby-on-rails-gems ruby-on-rails-plugins. We need to evangelize the DRY principal when tagging SO posts :)
No, not that i am aware of. There is a rails gem which is basically Rails, aka Ruby on Rails.
Gems are packages of Ruby code. Rails itself is a gem, and so is ActiveRecord, ActiveResource, etc etc.
I presume the tag is referring to gems that are compatible with Rails, such as Devise or acts_as_paranoid.
I guess it could be interpreted as "gems that are specifically made to work with Rails". There's plenty of gems which wouldn't work outside of a Rails app. I don't think it's a very useful tag though.
Related
I've got some helper code (monkey patches) I tend to carry around from rails project to rails project via simply copying files or pasting code into the initializers folder.
I think a clean way to deploy different categories of my initalizer code would be to simply add gems to my project Gemfile that would do the equivalent of this for me. I'm not very skilled at creating gems or the deeper side of ruby on rails engineering so I just wanted to know if this were possible before I got started with it.
Yes, this is definitely possible. It should be probably enough to make a simple gem, put your monkey-patches there and require them in the gem entry point (e.g., if the gem is called foobar, then bundler will require lib/foobar.rb by default).
There is a guide on creating gems available in Bundler docs. In case you need to interact with Rails application configuration, you can take a look at Rails Engines.
As a Rails developer I feel a bit stupid asking this question but hopefully I will learn something new and someone can put me out of my misery! In my rails applications I use (other peoples) gems all the time, I also use plugins from the community or my own.
I understand the benefits of use gems over plugins as they are version-able, segmented, system wide, easier to manage and share etc etc but I don't really know how to go about making a gem for my rails apps!?
Do you always start with a plugin and convert it to a gem, I've seen the words 'package it as Gem'. Also the gem I'm thinking of building would be no good in a normal ruby program, it's only useful to rails apps. I'm not even sure if the semantics of that make sense, 'RubyGem' that will only work in a rails application!?
I would like to create a gem (if that's what I should use?) for a discrete piece of functionality for my rails apps. It will need to add a database migration, new routes and provide controllers and views or useful view helpers. I'm know I can achieve this via a plug-in but would just like to know how/why to do it as a 'Ruby Gem'?
To avoid the risk of Over-engineering, I usually start with the feature I need directly into the application. Then, as soon as I need to use the same feature into another project, I check whether it is worth to extract it into a plugin or even a separate application providing an API.
Plugins and Gems are often interchangeable. Gems provides several significant advantages in terms of reusability and maintainability.
On the other side, there are some specific known issue. For instance, a Rails app actually can't load rake tasks defined into a plugin packaged as a Gem.
Almost every Rails plugin can be packaged as a Gem.
For instance, take my tabs_on_rails plugin.
You can install it as a Gem specifying the dependency on environment.rb. Or you can use script/plugin install command as you would expect.
If you want to achieve the same result, make sure to follow the standard Gem layout and provide the init.rb initialization script required by Rails.
Also, you might want to create an install.rb and uninstall.rb file to include the post-install and post-uninstall hooks when the plugin is installed as a standard Rails plugin.
Last but not least, if you package a plugin as Gem you can reuse it in non-Rails projects and provide Rails-specific initializations using the init.rb file. Non-Rails applications will simply ignore it.
If you want to make a plugin for Rails, https://peepcode.com/products/rails-2-plugin-patterns gives you a good start. After that, make the plugin into a gem.
To make a gem, this resource http://railscasts.com/episodes/183-gemcutter-jeweler will be helpful.
As of 2013 you'll want to use Bundler and the following tutorials:
#245 New Gem with Bundler -
RailsCasts
Make your own gem - RubyGems
Guides
Take a look at Jeweler. Jeweler gives you a set of rake tasks to make gem versioning and building very easy.
I have developed a simple library in Ruby and need to use this in several Rails applications (some of which are not built yet). What is the best way to easily add this Ruby library to several Rails applications as and when required? Our team is running Ubuntu and our repository is Mercurial.
Should I use a...
Rails plugin? This would be my first
choice but it appears not to support
Mercurial??
Ruby Gem?
Custom Rake script?
Other options??
Any pointers would be much appreciated!
Ruby already has an established mechanism for code sharing i.e. RubyGems. Jeweler makes Gem creation easy. I'd recommend that you check it out.
Make a gem or a plugin. Gems are better in my opinion, easier to manage.
My rule of thumb:
If it doesn't depend on rails, make it a gem.
If it depends on rails, make it a plugin.
Make a Rails plugin. It doesn't "support" Mercurial in the sense that you can't do script/plugin install $REPO_URL and have it work automatically, but if it's for your own use, then you won't miss that feature.
I will have to use JDBC with an old database, which I why I selected jRuby. If I get a book on ruby on rails that does not include jRuby information, will that be benficial to me?
Yes it will. Jruby is just another Ruby implementation, so pretty much everything that works in regular Ruby will work in Jruby as well. They have worked very hard at getting rails to run really well with Jruby While there are some gems that currently will not run in jruby, a Ruby On Rails book will definitely be relevant.
One thing to keep in mind though is you cannot run native (C code) gems with JRuby. However most of the popular ones have ports.
I'm starting work on a project using Rails, but I'm waiting for the 3rd edition of the pragmatic rails book to come out before I purchase a book.
Anyway, my question is a bit more pointed than how do I get started...
What are some of the must have gems that everyone uses?
I need basic authentication, so I have the restful authentication gem, but beyond that, I don't know what I don't know. Is there a run down of this information somewhere? Some basic setup that 99% of the people start with when starting a new rails application?
Thanks in advance.
The gems and plugins that I tend to use on most of my projects are:
Restful Authentication -- For authentication
Will Paginate -- For pagination
Attachment Fu -- For image and file attachments
RedCloth -- For textile rendering
Capistrano -- For deployment
For pagination, will_paginate.
This is very, very subjective because it all depends on what your application does! However, I've just had a look at the Gems I have installed and the one that absolutely does leap out as mandatory is Capistrano.
BTW Restful Authentication is a Rails plugin not a Gem.
HAML is a must have. You'll never think of HTML in the same way again -- No more tag soup.
sudo gem install haml
sudo gem install ZenTest
rspec on rails
How can nobody have mentioned andand yet? It's the best thing since ||=
The only gems you need are:
Rails
Rake
If you "gem install rails" you'll get everything you need for Rails. You only need gems when you need them, so it's not worth worrying about before then.
EDIT: Actually there are a couple more you'll probably need:
mysql - or whatever Ruby database driver you need
mongrel - you don't necessarily need this until production, but it's nice to use in dev/test too
ZenTest - I use this mainly for "autotest" so that my tests run in a console window whenever my source files change
There could be many other gems that help you but we'd need more info from you to know if they're applicable, eg:
Web scraping (hpricot)
CSV (fastercsv)
Amazon S3 support (aws-s3)
Image manipulation (rmagick)
Graphing (gruff) - I use this as a plugin
Role-based security (role_requirement) - This one is a plugin too
mini_magick instead of rmagick.
Might want to keep an eye on: http://rubygems.org/ - you can see some interesting stats there re: most downloaded, most active, etc...
Also interesting and somewhat telling: https://github.com/languages/Ruby
This is a old thread but I thought I'll refine the list with what I believe to be must have gems at this point in time:
RSpec or Shoulda - tools for BDD/testing
factory_girl - fixture replacement
will_paginate - simple pagination
paperclip - image uploading/attachment
CanCan - authorization
Authlogic - authentication
HAML - templating engine