Gems

Rubygems is the extension manager for ruby. Much like cpan is the extension manager for Perl. Gems is more than a packaging manager: it's a library versioning manager too! That is also it's achille's heel.

Install

Requires ruby to be installed prior.

Install rubygems

> wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/35283/rubygems-1.1.1.tgz
> tar -xvf rubygems-1.1.1.tgz
> cd rubygems-1.1.1
> ruby setup.rb

Install extra-packages for gems to work correctly

> sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

To configure gems on your system you need to set the environment variable RUBYOPT. This will preload "require gems" to every ruby script you run.

>vim ~/.bashrc
.bashrc> export RUBYOPT=rubygems

Popular gems

xmpp4r

xmpp is the open protocol behind the jabber service.

> sudo apt-get install libopenssl-ruby
> sudo gem install xmpp4r -y

Testing

> irb
irb> require 'xmpp4r/client'

xmpp4r-simple

> sudo gem install xmpp4r-simple -y

twitter

> sudo gem install twitter -y

External references

• Ruby,
• gems homepage