Jeweler is an awesome tool that gives you a generator to quickly set up the main skeleton for building a RubyGem. It has a bunch of rake tasks that make generating, creating, pushing and releasing your gem super easy without having to deal with the scary stuff. It’s great for anyone that thinks they don’t know or understand how to build a gem.
I’m taking Jeweler as an example here. There are a lot of gem builders out there that do the same thing, I just think Jeweler is the one most people know or use. This is not a Jeweler hate campaign, it’s about gem builders in general.
Half a year ago, the gems I released were all built and maintained using Jeweler, so I put my gem’s information in a Rakefile and generated my .gemspec — the file used to build the actual gem — from that. I published “.gitignore your *.gemspec”, arguing that the .gemspec shouldn’t be checked into source control, since it was a generated file.
After getting a lot of responses and reading @wycats’ article, I realized that generating the .gemspec file was silly, I completely changed my mind about the whole issue and wrote a follow up titled “Don’t put your *.gemspec in your Rakefile”. I’ve been manually maintaining my .gemspecs ever since.
A lot of people are still using (tools like) Jeweler, which is fine. I would like to ask you to take a look at a simple .gemspec file sometime and ask yourself if this would more difficult to write and maintain than a Rakefile specifying the exact same thing. I feel like a lot of people are using Jeweler because everyone did it when they started and haven’t looked back since.
Do we need this extra layer of abstraction? Doesn’t generating .gemspecs make everything more cumbersome? Is the Rakefile the correct place for your gem specification?
The new kid in town
If you read @ryanbigg’s great “Developing a RubyGem using Bundler” guide, you probably know that Bundler can also bootstrap your RubyGem using its gem command:
$ bundle gem my_gem
It’ll give you everything you need — like the .gitignore, Rakefile, Gemfile and .gemspec — but it puts your gem specification right where it belongs: directly in your .gemspec. Also, it sets up a Gemfile that automatically gets its dependencies from the .gemspec file, like I explained before.
For a more detailed explanation, check out Ryan’s guide.
Time to move on
While Jeweler and the like were wicked-cool back in the day, I think it’s time to move on. Maintaining writing a .gemspec yourself isn’t difficult at all and you don’t need a tool to generate one for you, look:
require File.expand_path("../lib/your_gem/version", __FILE__)
Gem::Specification.new do |gem|
gem.name = 'your_gem'
gem.version = YourGem::VERSION
gem.date = Date.today.to_s
gem.summary = "an awesome gem"
gem.description = "extended description"
gem.authors = ['Me Myself', 'One Other']
gem.email = 'me@example.com'
gem.homepage = 'http://github.com/user/your_gem'
gem.add_dependency('rake')
gem.add_development_dependency('rspec', [">= 2.0.0"])
# ensure the gem is built out of versioned files
gem.files = Dir['Rakefile', '{bin,lib,man,test,spec}/**/*', 'README*', 'LICENSE*'] & `git ls-files -z`.split("\0")
end
If you like to have a tool to set up a gem skeleton for you, I would suggest using Bundler. It’s the cleanest gem builder I’ve come across so far.
What do you think? Do you prefer treating your .gemspec as a generated file? Do you use a gem builder? Let me know in the comments.