Ruby Gems

[philz]

Is it possible to install extra Ruby gems?

[paul]

It seems to be theoretically possible to have a custom installation of Ruby Gems under your home directory, or even just a custom gem repository. Take a look at http://rubygems.org/read/chapter/3#page83.

If it's possible to have a local repository without adding a custom installation of Ruby Gems, it may just be as simple as creating a directory for the gem repository and adding

export GEM_HOME=/home/myusername/mygemrepository

to ".bash_profile". If that worked, then you could install as many extra gems as you wanted. You'd probably have to reinstall all the regular gems in your new custom repository, though.

[raavin]

I haven't actually tried it on hostmonster yet but you can get a rake task from http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2005/12/22/freeze-other-gems-to-rails-lib-directory which will freeze your gem in the lib directory.

Alternatively you can put in a support request to get them to install it for you. You need to supply your domain and a link to the website for your gem.

Raavin ;)

[paul]

OK, I decided to try my own advice:

cd ~/local
mkdir gems
export GEM_HOME=$HOME/local/gems
gem query --local

This gives me a blank listing of local gems.


*** LOCAL GEMS ***

Then I tried

gem query --remote

Unfortunately, that spewed out a bunch of errors. Whoops! I'm on the right track, though. I'll post again if I get it to work. I don't have time to continue this experiment this morning.

[paul]

On second thought, starting with an empty repository is a mistake, because you need the "sources" package to do easy remote installation. Hence the errors. It's better to start with the host repository as a base. Here's my updated instructions for creating a local gem repository (without building RubyGems from source). Make sure ~/local/gems does not exist already or use a different directory.

First, copy the host repository to your local directory in SSH.

cd ~/local
mkdir gems
cp -r /lib/ruby/gems/1.8 ./gems


Second, add the following line to "~/.bash_profile"

export GEM_HOME=$HOME/local/gems


If you want, check to make sure it's working and install the progressbar gem:

gem query --local
gem query --remote
gem install progressbar


From there you should be able to add as many gems as you need.

[Mathieu]

Thanks alot for the answer. Saved me alot of time

[nanalq]

I tried to follow your example however when i try to install a gem i get
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Errno::EACCES)
Permission denied - /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/cache/ferret-0.11.3.gem
can anyone help me ??