ruby requiring an arbitrary ruby gem in irb session - ruby

Question

I've been playing around with Rails for some time. But now I am attempting to build a ruby gem. And I am using rubymine which builds a gem template for you. In my case it looks like this:
$ ls
bin Gemfile lib Rakefile test
binarytree.gemspec Gemfile.lock LICENSE.txt README.md
merlino#johnmerlino:~/Documents/github/binarytree$
Inside the lib directory, I have a file called binarytree.rb, which contains the following contents:
require "binarytree/version"
module Binarytree
class BinaryNode
attr_accessor :value, :left, :right
def initialize(value=nil)
#value = value
#left = nil
#right = nil
end
def add(value)
if value <= #value
if #left
#left.add value
else
#left = BinaryNode.new value
end
else
if #right
#right.add value
else
#right = BinaryNode.new value
end
end
end
end
class BinaryTree
attr_accessor :root
def initialize
#root = nil
end
def add(value)
if !#root
#root = BinaryNode.new value
else
#root.add value
end
end
def contains(value)
node = #root
while node
if value == node.value
return true
elsif value < node.value
node = node.left
else
node = node.right
end
end
false
end
end
end
What I want to be able to do is run an irb (interactive ruby shell) session, and then be able to require 'binarytree' and have this code inside scope of irb, so I could start playing with it e.g. BinaryTree.new.
Right now I am not sure how to require this in irb:
require 'binarytree'
LoadError: cannot load such file -- binarytree
from /home/merlino/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.0.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:45:in require'
from /home/merlino/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.0.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:45:inrequire'
from (irb):1
from /home/merlino/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/irb:13:in `'
I am on Ubuntu and I am using rvm to manage gems.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

You have two options:
Go into catalog of your gem and run require './lib/binarytree.rb'
Run rake install inside catalog of your gem - this will build and install this gem into system gems.

Answer 2

I got it working the following way:
1) You first need to edit the gemspec:
binarytree.gemspec
And edit the description and summary lines as so:
spec.description = "binary tree"
spec.summary = "binary tree summary"
Otherwise you will get the following error:
gem build doctor_toons.gemspec
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::InvalidSpecificationException)
"FIXME" or "TODO" is not a description
2) Then run the gemspec as so:
gem build binarytree.gemspec
This should output something that looks like this:
binarytree-0.0.1.gem
3) Now if you are using rvm, make sure you are using the version you want, and run the following:
gem install ./binarytree-0.0.1.gem
The output should look something like this:
Successfully installed binarytree-0.0.1
Parsing documentation for binarytree-0.0.1
Installing ri documentation for binarytree-0.0.1
Done installing documentation for binarytree after 0 seconds
Done installing documentation for binarytree (0 sec).
1 gem installed
4) Then launch irb and require the new gem:
irb(main):001:0> require 'binarytree'