i made my first rubygem!

In an effort to make the world better for others I made my new recipe library for capistrano into a ruby gem. It took a little doing as there didn't appear to be a concise example on the rubygems site of how to construct the gemspec file. Dave Thomas's Pickaxe book covered it well though.

So here's my quick and dirty guide to creating a gem.

Make a file called projectname.gemspec

require 'rubygems'
SPEC = Gem::Specification.new do |spec|
  spec.name = 'deprec'
  spec.version = '0.1.1'
  spec.summary = 'deployment recipes for capistrano'
  spec.description = <<-EOF
      This project provides libraries of Capistrano tasks and extensions to
      remove the repetative manual work associated with installing services
      on linux servers.
  EOF
  spec.require_path = "lib"
  # spec.platform = Gem::Platform::Ruby
  # spec.required_ruby_version = '>= 1.6.8' # I don't know
  spec.add_dependency('capistrano', '>= 1.2.0')
  spec.files = Dir['lib/*.rb']
end

Then run these commands to build and install the gem

gem build deprec.gemspec
sudo gem install deprec-0.1.1.gem

I applied for a rubyforge project today and aim to publish the gem when it gets approved.