Note To Self: How To Build Gems

Update (18 October): things have changed.

~~~~~~~~

This topic has come up quite a bit recently. I’d never really thought about it much before — I just used Jeweler because that’s what GitHub recommended. However I had been noticing that Jeweler made what should have been a simple task complicated. And it decimated the signal to noise ratio of my commits: my “real” commits were swamped by ones Jeweler made to update the version number and so on.

So after looking into the matter briefly, here’s what I now think.

The gemspec DSL is nice and clean. Don’t hide it behind something like Jeweler.

We need to:

• build versioned gems
• build versioned archives (.tar.gz)
• tag the versions in Git / on GitHub
• push the versioned gems to rubygems.org
• (optional) install versioned gems locally

We can do all this by hand; it’s pretty simple. We can also save typing with Rake.

Either DIY:

• Fyi’s rakefile (but not DRY and no archives yet)
• Shotgun’s rakefile
• Mustache’s rakefile

Or using a simple tool like minimal gem (mg):

• Gist’s rakefile