How to write a simple Rails gem

Today, I wrote my first Ruby on Rails gem.  It was a very simple refactoring of our code that I undertook when I needed to add the same functionality to a new model and I decided to do it as a gem instead of keeping it within our project.  I wanted to see how it worked and this is what I ended up with.  You can follow the Rails Guide, but it didn't cover everything I wanted to do.

Create a repository for your gem.

You can do this on github, like I did for my gem, locally, or somewhere else.  

Create a skeleton gem

The rails guide for creating a plugin has this, but the details in the guide are thin.

Rails 3.1 ships with a rails plugin new command which creates a skeleton for developing any kind of Rails extension with the ability to run integration tests using a dummy Rails application.

I used this to create a skeleton for my plugin:

This creates a skeleton gem with a dummy rails application you can use for testing your gem.

Switch to rspec

I've used rspec for all my rails testing and I wanted to use it with my new gem as well.  However, the generator creates a test-unit dummy application out of the box.  This StackOverflow question had a good answer that I used to switch from test-unit to rspec.

1. Add rspec as a development dependency in your gemspec
2. Bundle Install
3. Convert from test-unit to rspec
4. Modify spec_helper.rb with code taken from test_helper.rb
5. Run the tests
6. Commit the skeleton gem to source control

Author your gem

At this point, you have a skeleton gem that you can use to write your code.  The gem I wrote added some behavior to ActiveRecord models, so I started out by generating some models in the dummy rails application located in spec/dummy and using test-driven development to build my gem.  

Try it with a real project

The tests you author along with your gem are very helpful, but a time will come when you want to try your gem on your local file system with a real project.  You can include a gem from the local file system with this in your gemfile:

Squash your commits

When you've got your gem working and you are ready to publish it, you may want to squash all your commits to the repository into a single commit.

Take a look at http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/10/squashing-commits-with-rebase.html or search the web on how to squash multiple commits to a single commit, or try it with git rebase -i