Jeweler: Craft the perfect RubyGem

Jeweler provides two things:

• Rake tasks for managing gems and versioning of a GitHub project
• A generator for creating kickstarting a new project

Setting up in an existing project

It's easy to get up and running. Update your instantiate a Jeweler::Tasks, and give it a block with details about your project.

begin
  require 'jeweler'
  Jeweler::Tasks.new do |s|
    s.name = "the-perfect-gem"
    s.summary = "TODO"
    s.email = "josh@technicalpickles.com"
    s.homepage = "http://github.com/technicalpickles/the-perfect-gem"
    s.description = "TODO"
    s.authors = ["Josh Nichols"]
  end
rescue LoadError
  puts "Jeweler not available. Install it with: sudo gem install technicalpickles-jeweler -s http://gems.github.com"
end

In this example, s is a Gem::Specification object. See the documentation for what possible values you can set on it.

Kicking off a new project

Jeweler provides a generator. It requires you to setup your name and email for git and your username and token for GitHub.

jeweler the-perfect-gem

This will prepare a project in the 'the-perfect-gem' directory, setup to use Jeweler.

It supports a number of options:

• --create-repo: in addition to preparing a project, it create an repo up on GitHub and enable RubyGem generation
• --shoulda: generate test_helper.rb and empty test ready for shoulda (this is the default)
• --bacon: generate spec_helper.rb and empty spec ready for bacon

Gemspec

Jeweler handles generating a gemspec file for your project:

rake gemspec

This creates a gemspec for your project. It's based on the info you give Jeweler::Tasks, the current version of your project, and some defaults that Jeweler provides.

Gem

Jeweler gives you tasks for building and installing your gem:

rake build
rake install

Versioning

Jeweler tracks the version of your project. It assumes you will be using a version in the format x.y.z. x is the 'major' version, y is the 'minor' version, and z is the patch version.

Initially, your project starts out at 0.0.0. Jeweler provides Rake tasks for bumping the version:

rake version:bump:major
rake version:bump:minor
rake version:bump:patch

Releasing

Jeweler handles releasing your gem into the wild:

rake release

It does the following for you:

• Regenerate the gemspec to the latest version of your project
• Push to GitHub (which results in a gem being build)
• Tag the version and push to GitHub

Workflow

• Hack, commit, hack, commit, etc, etc
• rake version:bump:patch release to do the actual version bump and release
• Have a delicious scotch
• Go to Has My Gem Built Yet and wait for your gem to be built

Links

• Bugs
• Donate