Can gems be assigned different interpreters? - ruby

I fee like I've seen that this was possible in some documentation before, but now I'm not able to find it. Is it possible to have a gemfile like:
gem "somegem", :interpreter => :MRI
gem "othergem", :interpreter => :macruby
etc, etc
I am needing this because in macruby some gems do not work, so it'd be great if you could get around that this way.

Are you looking for the platforms parameters? :platforms => mri_19 and so on. They only alow you to specify which gems to run under the current platform not how to run the gems.
EDIT: Anyways if you are not building any Cocoa applications use CRuby (MRI) by default, as it the most complete implementation of Ruby, or try RVM for handling multiple Ruby installations.

Related

Why should I use application-specific RVM gemsets in addition to Bundler?

I'm using RVM to manage my local Ruby installations, and Bundler for application dependency management.
Some people recommend using a separate RVM gemset for each application, while some seem to think that's not necessary.
So what are the advantages of using a separate RVM gemset for each application, when I'm using Bundler anyway? What are the risks of not doing so?
i use gemsets in addition to bundler because of the following:
easy to just drop everything once a while (i like messing around with my installed gems)
no need to call bundle exec (this is obsolete with binstubs)
faster loading, because less gem-specs need to be parsed
easy to distribute (copy it to your mates)
there are probably more reasons to use them, but i generally like the idea of sandboxes!
I've found that it's useful to have rvm if you're using rails 2. RVM is great if you need to work on an app that has old code. Rails 2 doesn't use a Gemfile, so bundle exec doesn't work. RVM makes it easy to keep the gem versions correct for that project, and they you can switch back to newer versions of rails and use the Gemfile to specify versions. If you have multiple apps that use different gem versions, but the same version of ruby, it's convenient to share most of the gems, and specify them in the Gemfile where they differ.
I think it's kind of case dependent. If you find that there are tons of version issues between two apps, and constantly modifying Gemfiles to keep them straight is annoying, then use separate gemsets. If there is enough in common, it might make sense to just use the same gemset
RVM gemsets allow you to separate gems without loading bundler - which is faster, it will be simpler to load the gems.
You should be using gemsets to just separate projects from your helper gems (like gist).
But if you decide that gemsets are of no help for you you can tell RVM to ignore gemsets totally:
echo "export rvm_ignore_gemsets_flag=1" >> ~/.rvmrc
Might I also refer you to the 'globalcache' documentation in the form of an rvm-test located at fast/globalcache_comment_test.sh in conjunction with your projects' Gemfile.
This will also cut down on the network traffic to rubygems.org. Initial loadout of global, not withstanding.

Getting newer gems

I'm really just a beginner to ruby, so hopefully this is an easy one. I've got to the point where I'm starting to look into some of the gems that the community have put together. I decided to check out something that would help my application consume rss feeds. So, headed over to rubygems (which is where i thought people go to get these kinds of things) and searched for rss. I found this one;
http://rubygems.org/gems/simple-rss
instructions were to just install the gem with
gem install simple-rss
So far, so good. When i came to actually use the gem, the documentation I received from doing the above was a bit naff, so i searched a bit further and found the git repo;
https://github.com/cardmagic/simple-rss
The documentation there (their code examples) complain about missing methods etc. and after a bit of digging I came to the conclusion that I must have downloaded an older version of the gem than the git trunk.
So, my question is, should I be using rubygems to get the latest gems, and if not, what other resources are out there to help find the latest builds of the comminities gems?
As far as finding a good gem for a task — use Ruby Toolbox, since it also shows you how actively maintained a gem is. Here's, for example, a section on feed parsing.
If you want to get the latest gem code that hasn't been released yet, you could download the code directly from github and build the gem yourself. However, it's easier to use bundler for that. It allows you to create a Gemfile for your project looking something like the following.
gem 'simple_rss', :git => "git://github.com/cardmagic/simple-rss.git"
Then run bundle command to download and build these gems from their corresponding sources.
In general, bundler is a great solution for managing gem dependencies for any ruby project. It provides ways to quickly reference any released gems, automatically builds gems directly from a git source, git refs, or paths on your filesystem, and has other convenient features.
By far the best place for all things Ruby & Ruby on Rails for the devs is the Ruby Toolbox

How to get Shoes to use an already installed gem?

I have a ruby gem I created and installed and want to be able to use it in a Shoes app. As expected, Shoes reports it cannot find the gem, understandably since the gem is only installed for the standard ruby distribution. Can help pointing towards documentation explaining how to get Shoes to find this gem would be most appreciated.
Thanks.
Unless things have changed since _why left, this is not possible. Shoes is a separate Ruby installation and therefore needs its own gems.
To install a gem, you can do something like this at the beginning of your Shoes app:
Shoes.setup do
gem 'json'
end
Edit: there's also this previous SO thread:
Using Ruby libraries and gems with a Shoes app
U can think Shoes as a ruby-distro, like jruby or other rubies, it maintains its own gems.
therefore you will need to install it via shoes way like Michael Kohl said

How to distribute a Ruby application with the required gems

I've developed a Ruby application (a small game), and I would like to 'distribute' it to other people.
However, I am not sure what to do about the required gems. If I just send my application to someone who have ruby installed, but not the required gems, I assume it will blow up. Can I package the gems locally? If so, would it conflict if the other person has a different version of the gem?
So, what is the smart/proper/good way of doing this?
The best way would probably be to just package your game as a gem as well, that way rubygems will take care of installing the dependencies. Here's the documentation explaining how to create your own gems.
If you'd rather not package your game as a gem, you could investigate the Bundler, which will be integrated into Rails 3.
In your environment.rb you can express your gem dependencies, eg.
config.gem "activemerchant", :lib => "active_merchant", :version => "1.4.1"
This isn't as automatic as gem dependencies, but it certainly usable. User must sudo rake gems:install to get your app to start.
If you're looking for a way to create OSX .dmg's and Windows Installers, there's a gem called releasy that will do all of that for you, and it is specifically tailored for releasing GUI apps written in Ruby. It bundles up Ruby and all your gem dependencies in to a single executable so that your end user doesn't have to install anything extra.
You will need access to a Windows/OSX environment to make the installers.

Ruby: just-in-time gem installation?

Would it be possible to override the default "require" by adding automatic download-and-install code for any missing includes (provided that the missing include is published as a ruby gem).
Which would not work in situations where Ruby is not interfaced with a shell. But still I think it would be an interesting idea.
Is there such a mechanism in existence today?
Edit:Removed portion about password check. I just checked and gem install doesn't seem to require me to type my password.
You would be able to hijack require method so as gems are installed when an attempt is made to require them, but still you won't have access to newly installed gem in current process, because gem index has to be reloaded.
I understand the intentions but I think exercise might not be worth it.
When installing a fresh gem the gem will be installed in the GEM_HOME. If that is not writable then it will try in the user's home .gem directory (on *NIX at least).
You could certainly script this. In a way Rail's rake gems:build is just this. Just not on demand.
But, I would recommend against this. You could run into build, versioning, dependency and network issues. And probably security issues as well.
PS: Francis Hwang did something related a while ago, although only as a require, not a require gems.
http://fhwang.net/2005/11/01/urirequire-I-got-yer-Web-2-0-right-here
A better option would be to use bundler and distribute the required gems with the application.
It is also quite simple to write a script to bootstrap the installation of gems if you didn't
want to distribute them with your code (using the bundle install/check commands)

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