How do I get an installed ruby gem included in Rails? - ruby-on-rails

I am attempting to get a gem I installed working in a Rails application. I can require the gem just fine in a Ruby program that I run from the command line using:
require 'nokogiri'
But when I attempt to do the same in one of my Rails controllers it errors saying "no such file to load -- nokogiri".
I tried using the full path to the lib/nokogiri.rb file, but that fails because it cannot find "nokogiri/native".

Better, place the following in your environment.rb file:
Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
...
config.gem :nokogiri
...
end
This will tell Rails that you depend on that particular gem. It also allows you to specify particular versions, and it will automatically keep all your gems synched, or unpack them into vendor/gems if you so wish.

I had a similar error but simply forgot to put the following in my environment.rb file: (note the quoted "nokogiri")
Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
...
config.gem "nokogiri"
...
end

Ok I figured it out. This is going to sound pretty stupid...but oh well...
It turns out I had two installations of ruby on my machine. I use InstantRails to serve my test applications and it comes prepackaged with an installation of ruby. I had another installation however outside of this and it was here that nokogiri had been installed, not in the installation in InstantRails.
In any case they were looking in different spots for the gems.

Try the following
require 'rubygems'
gem 'nokogiri'
If you are on some form of *nix then did you get any errors when you installed the gem, particularly errors stating that the gem was not on the path. This may happen if you have installed the gem as yourself rather than as root and you do not have your personal gem library in your gem path.
If you always install your gems using
sudo gem install some_gem_name
then you should not get that problem.

Related

How to require a gem in .irbrc without needing to also add it to a Rails Gemfile?

I've added awesome_print to my ~/.irbrc file like so:
require 'ap'
Inside a Rails project directory, if I run irb it loads the gem fine, because I've already installed the gem locally. But if I run rails console, it spits out this error:
cannot load such file -- ap
How can I resolve this? I am guessing that it's looking for the gem in the app's Gemfile, but I don't want to add it to the Gemfile because I don't want other developers requiring that dependency. I only want to use awesome_print on my machine.
I am also using rbenv, if that is of any help.
There is this trick.
What you need to do is
# Copy the definition of the debundle! method into your ~/.irbrc
# Call 'debundle!' from IRB when you need to.
(as explained at the top of the file)
The text as it appears on the referred to site:
debundle.rb allows you to require gems that are not in your Gemfile when inspecting
programs that are run with Bundler.
Use at your own risk!
Paste the code of debundle.rb and you are done! A good place would be your .irbrc file
before requiring irbtools.
The code is directly taken from pry-debundle.
Please look there for any further information. This repo exists to simplify debundling
without using the pry repl.

Need explanation of the ruby gem loading process. Not rails, just plain ruby. Some gems get loaded and others dont get loaded. Why?

Ruby is so darn mysterious when it comes to using the gems! Where do these gems reside?? In java, you can have as many jars you want just include them in your CLASSPATH and your good to go. Ruby is a simpler language, but why do I need the headache of dealing with simple crap? Can anyone seriously finally explain how the gem loading process works? It seems like no one really knows why the heck do requiring some gems work, and requiring others doesn't even if you have gem installed them and they are in the gem list. Where is the authority in ruby on this site that can finally clarify the gem loading process.
I am tried of including 'rubygems' in my ruby scripts to prevent errors like LoadError: no such file to load -- pony
And even when I do require 'rubygems' in my scripts, it still gives LoadErrors. Even if the gem is in my gem list.
When you're using Bundler to manage Gems in your project (you will have a Gemfile at the root directory of the project), be sure to run
bundle install
requiring rubygems just loads rubygems itself (and isn't required in ruby 1.9 and above)
You need to actually load each gem individually via require.
If you use bundler, then you can optionally have bundle auto require everything from your Gemfile

Trouble including httparty in ruby on rails

I've been trying to use HTTParty in my rails code
sudo gem install httparty
From the command line I can now successfully do
httparty "http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.json"
When I try this in my rails app
require 'rubygems'
require 'httparty'
class FooController < ApplicationController
include HTTParty
def bar
blah = HTTParty.get("http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.json")
end
end
I get the error message "no such file to load -- httparty"
I suspect there is something wrong with my environment?
You don't need to do 'include HTTParty' inside the Controller. Just remove that and it should work. I just tested it and it worked for me. If this doesn't work for you, you should add the gem to your environment.
Usually if you use a gem inside your Rails application, you should add the following to environment.rb:
config.gem "httparty"
The gem will be available in the application now and you don't need to add 'require' inside the Controller. Also, you don't need to require RubyGems inside a Controller.
When you use Rails 3, you need to put the following inside the Gemfile:
gem "httparty"
I hope it works for you. :)
The problem is, if you load a new gem, you have to restart the server even if you are in development.
I had this same error. I tried moving the require HTTParty all over, but found, all I needed to do was restart the rails server In the end I did not need to 'require HTTParty' nor 'include' it. It just needed to be loaded into rails.
1)include the httpary in your gemfile
open your gem file then add
gem 'httparty','YOUR VERSION NUMBER'
2) run bundle install in your command prompt of the app file
3) restart the server
Ran into the same problem. Then I switched from Ruby 1.8.7 to Ruby 1.9.2 and all errors varnished into thin air.
(Yes, it first took me quite some hours to come up with the possibility that the Ruby version might be the problem. Configured a secundairy server to avoid possible conflicts with 2 ruby versions, and after way to many hours I got my RoR stack up and running. And the first test with httparty (based on the example on top) worked out of the box! Finally can sleep RESTfully again :-)
I run into the same error whilst reviewing a project from a student, I change the name of the Gem from uppercase to lowercase then run bundle install. I then went ahead to change the format in which they were being imported from
require 'HTTParty' to require 'httparty' and boom it worked

Rails optional gem config

What do you do when you want to use a gem for development/testing that you don't want to force other devs to use? Right now I have
begin
require 'redgreen'
rescue LoadError
end
in test_helper.rb and no gem config, but that seems like a clumsy approach, albeit a functional one. I'd like to do something like the following:
config.gem "redgreen", :optional => true
Any other suggestions? Or should I just vendor those pretty superficial gems...?
EDIT
To be clear, I am only talking about those specific gems, like redgreen, which aren't actually used in the functional code, but only in the coding process. There is no need to vendor these at all, except to avoid the conditional require.
Gems that are specific to your development environment should be installed in your gemset or local gems, but not in the Gemfile.
A classic example is the ruby-debug-base19x which Rubymine needs for debugging. This is installed in your local gemset, but not in the Gemfile because not all coders use Rubymine.
[EDIT]
Indeed, everything is run in the context of the bundle, and outside gems are not reachable. There do exist some workarounds indeed. Most of them are dirty :)
I found a lot of good solutions in this bundler issue.
The nicest solution was to add this to your .irbrc :
# Add all gems in the global gemset to the $LOAD_PATH so they can be used even
# in places like 'rails console'.
if defined?(::Bundler)
global_gemset = ENV['GEM_PATH'].split(':').grep(/ruby.*#global/).first
if global_gemset
all_global_gem_paths = Dir.glob("#{global_gemset}/gems/*")
all_global_gem_paths.each do |p|
gem_path = "#{p}/lib"
$LOAD_PATH << gem_path
end
end
end
require 'irb/completion'
require 'rubygems'
require 'wirble'
Wirble.init
Wirble.colorize
If you then install wirble to the global gemset, it can then be found.
Original source: https://gist.github.com/794915
Hope this helps.
I answered a similar question of my own here
User-level bundler Gemfile
One way to do this is to create different environments:
group :scott do
end
Then
bundle --with-env=scott
Ok, I think I've come up with something. Basically, the idea is to only execute a secondary Gemfile when a Rails app is executing. To do this we add two things:
First, we alter the rails script a little:
# in ./script/rails
Kernel::IN_RAILS_APP = true
APP_PATH = File.expand_path('../../config/application', __FILE__)
require File.expand_path('../../config/boot', __FILE__)
require 'rails/commands'
Second, we tell bundler to pull in the secondary Gemfile if we're in a rails app and a secondary file exists:
# Gemfile
if Kernel.const_defined?(:IN_RAILS_APP)
local_gemfile = File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/Gemfile.local"
if File.exists?(local_gemfile)
puts 'using local gemfile'
self.instance_eval(Bundler.read_file(local_gemfile))
end
end
Now you can add a Gemfile.local to your project and run specific gems on a per-machine basis. bundle install works normally since the IN_RAILS_APP constant doesn't exist.
** Make sure to add Gemfile.local to your .gitignore.
In my opinions this is what environments are for. Fortunately there is also a way provided to do it with what is in your Gemfile, this is also how rails use it: groups
Pretty much use the environments the same way rails use it. Here is what you could find in your Gemfile:
group :test do
# Pretty printed test output
gem 'turn', :require => false
end
And here is what you can find in your config/application.rb
Bundler.require(:default, Rails.env) if defined?(Bundler)
All you would need to do is to change your local environment settings and the others working with you won't be affected unless they decide to. Everything gets committed and nothing gets lost.
Here some links :
http://yehudakatz.com/2010/05/09/the-how-and-why-of-bundler-groups/
http://gembundler.com/groups.html
If you want it to be optional, it's better to freeze the gem as a plugin. However, it's not a good idea to use different gems than the rest of a development team, as it creates some inconsistencies in the codebase that can be hard to track down later. I would say add it to config.gem, and just tell the other developers to do:
rake gems:install
And you're done.
This is how I tackled the same problem under Rails 3.1. In my Gemfile:
if File.exists? './tmp/eric_dev_gems'
gem 'redgreen'
gem 'awesome_print'
gem 'wirble'
gem 'wirb'
gem 'hirb'
end
Create a file in ./tmp/ (or in some folder which is in your .gitignore) of your choosing. I used eric_dev_gems. This should be ignored by git, and will only exist on your system unless one of your teammates decides he wants to create that file too.
I solved it by putting this in my gem file:
$gem_names ||= ENV['GEM_PATH'].split(':').map{|g| Dir.glob("#{g}/gems/*").map{|p|p.split('/gems/').last}}.flatten
gem 'redgreen' if $gem_names.any?{|n| n=~/redgreen/ }
That way the gem will only be used if you manually installed it on your system.
This works well but has the downside that it puts the gem name in the Gemfile.lock. This is of little consequence because the gem does not get installed with bundle install but it does make your lock file a bit messy and can cause the lock file to change a bit from one developer to the next.
If that is an issue for you another option is to keep the gemfile clean and require the gem by its full path, or you can add the path for just that gem. Like this:
$gem_paths ||= ENV['GEM_PATH'].split(':').map{|g| Dir.glob("#{g}/gems/*")}.flatten
$gem_paths.grep(/redgreen/).each {|p|$LOAD_PATH << p+'/lib'}
require 'redgreen' rescue nil

What does config.gem (in environment.rb) do?

I've been told that doing:
config.gem 'tzinfo'
doesn't obviate the need to require 'tzinfo'. Is this true of all gems? If yes, what exactly does adding config.gem WHATEVER do?
config.gem should cause the gem to be automatically required. You should not need to do a manual 'require' call.
config.gem
Tells Rails to load this gem automatically
Tells Rails that this gem is needed for the application, so that rake gems:install will install it
The :source option can tell rails to get it from a nonstandard repository
The :lib option can tell rails to load a non-standard file from the gem (i.e. something not named after the gem itself)
If i'm correct, during the environment initialization 'config.gem' allows your app to setup and require GEM dependencies from within the app, without the need to have to install them manually. (As we did before) By calling "config.gem tzinfo" as you did above, it automagically requires the gem across the app. This helps when you deploy to an external server and need to prepare the app along with necessary gems, etc. You can then run RAKE GEMS:INSTALL and rails will pull in all your gems and require them.
A thing to note though is that if you DO NOT want a gem to be required across your app. Then add ":lib => false" after config.gem i.e (config.gem 'tzinfo' :lib => false).
In some cases, (I followed your link) if you're getting an uninitialized gem, and you've manually installed it. Make sure that the config.gem ":lib" directory matches with the correct :lib directory of the gem. I.E a gem may be packaged and installed as "nlewis-supergem", however I may need to point the lib at "supergem". i.e "config.gem "nlewis-supergem" :lib=>"supergem". It all depends on how some people package their gem and the corresponding libraries.
A quick tip is instead of installing manually always install the gem via "config.gem" and then rake GEMS:INSTALL to catch any wierd errors before deployment.
Hope this helps.

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