The Standard Tools of the Ruby Platform
- Platform Overview
- The Ruby Shell
- More on RubyGems
- Using the Built-in Documentation
- The ERB Template System
- The Rake Task Automation Utility
Today, several implementations of Ruby exist, all using the same language syntax, and providing the same platform components. This article is a set of notes on the standard components of this common Ruby platform.
Platform Overview
The core components of a Ruby platform are:
- A Ruby interpreter
- The Ruby standard library
- An interactive shell
- RubyGems package manager
- rdoc documentation infrastructure
- ri command-line documentation viewer
Rake: As of Ruby 1.9, the Rake task automation system is also officially part of the Ruby platform.
The official Ruby 1.8 platform uses the MRI interpreter and the irb interactive shell. MRI is implemented in C, and versions are compiled for all mainstream operating systems. Ruby 1.9 uses the much faster YARV, instead of MRI. JRuby runs on the JRE, and is actually a Java library.
RubyGems Packages
RubyGems provides a cross-platform mechanism for managing the third-party Ruby software on your system, which are provided as gem packages. For convenience, set up Ruby itself by following the appropriate installation process for your operating system, and then use RubyGems to install and update the rest of your Ruby software.
RubyGems is part of the standard library for Ruby 1.9, and is often supplied with distributions of Ruby 1.8, but was not included in official Ruby 1.8 releases. For this reason, the process for installing Ruby 1.8 on your system may involve an extra step to set up RubyGems.
The Ruby Shell
A Ruby shell lets you simply type code and run it, without needing to setup any application structure. This lets you quickly write and run one-time jobs, and try things out.
To run an interactive Ruby shell on Debian or Ubuntu, type:
irb1.8
The irb program runs the contents of the file ~/.irbrc when the shell is started. Use this file to define user-specific settings.
Use the -d option to run irb with debugging:
irb -d
On Windows, use the fxri program provided by the One Click Ruby Installer, instead of irb.
Built-in Commands
In addition to standard Ruby code, you may invoke built-in commands inside an irb session:
- fg – switch to a different subsession
- irb – creates a new subsession
- jobs – list current irb subsessions
- conf – display configuration settings
- exit – exit the shell
More on RubyGems
Each gem package is an archive file that encloses both code and spec files. The spec defines the package, and lists any other gem packages that are required for it to function. RubyGems can then automatically install the requirements for a requested package before it installs the package itself.
All gems are versioned, and you may have multiple versions of the same package installed. A gem may also be digitally signed, but this is not mandatory. Use the security policy option to specify how RubyGems should handle signed and unsigned gems.
Installing Packages with RubyGems
A very simple example:
gem install hpricot
By default, RubyGems downloads gem packages from the RubyForge Website, but you may add or remove source servers.
Notice that the gem utility copies metadata and the required gem files into a local cache for reuse, before installing or updating any files that are required to complete the operation that you specified.
Gem Installation Directory: The current version of RubyGems installs gems into a .gem subdirectory within your home directory, unless you run the commands as an administrator. This was not the case before version 1.3 of RubyGems.
Some gems include C libraries as well as Ruby, and these are marked with the platform that the C code has been compiled for, e.g. win32 for Windows platforms. In these cases, the gems for the ruby platform actually provide source code, and RubyGems will automatically attempt to compile working extensions as part of the setup process.
To run unit tests prior to installing a gem, add the -t option:
gem install gem-name -t
To specify a security policy to apply when installing a gem, use the -P option:
gem install gem-name -P HighSecurity
To install a specific version of a gem, use the -v option:
gem install gem-name -v version-number
To install a gem without the documentation, use the options:
gem install gem-name --no-doc --no-ri
This option is probably most useful for servers.
Querying with RubyGems
The gem utility provides two basic features for querying repositories. Use gem list as a convenient way to find the name of relevant gems, and gem query for more detailed searches.
To get a list of all of the gem packages that are already installed on your system, run the list command:
gem list
If you add part, or all of a word, gem list show only those gems whose names begin with that set of characters:
gem list ra
To see a list of those packages whose names or descriptions include a particular word, use query with the -n option:
gem query -n search-word
To search the public server, use the same command, but specify the —remote option:
gem query --remote -n search-word
Use the —details option to see a little more information with the search results:
gem query --details -n search-word
To view exhaustive details of a gem, use specification, instead of list or query. The specification command only applies to the one specific gem that is named, rather than all of those that match a search term:
gem specification --remote gem-name
Use the same command with —local to investigate an installed gem.
Removing Packages with RubyGems
To remove a gem, use uninstall:
gem uninstall gem-name
The routine will prompt you before it removes any command-line utilities that have been installed by the package.
Updating Installed Gems
Updating System Files Requires Administrative Privileges: As always, you need administrator privileges to successfully change any software that is installed in a system directory. This includes the system copy of RubyGems, and any gems that are in the global gems directory for the system.
Run the update command to upgrade all of the gems on your system:
gem update
By design, this command does not automatically upgrade RubyGems itself. To do that use the —system option:
gem update --system
To upgrade a particular gem, specify the name of the gem package:
gem update gem-name
Any dependencies for the gem will also be updated at the same time.
Other RubyGems Facilities
For a list of supported gem operations:
gem command options
You only need to enter enough of the command name to uniquely identify it.
For example, to display help text for all of the available commands, type one of the following:
gem help commands
gem h commands
Other useful commands:
- gem server – To launch a Web server that makes gem packages and documentation available.
- gem -h – Display short list of options.
- gem -v – Display RubyGems version.
- gem help command-name – Displays the help text for the specified command.
Using the Built-in Documentation
To view documentation for packages installed with RubyGems in a Web browser, first start the gem server:
gem server
The server attaches to port 8808 of your system, so use this URL in any browser:
http://localhost:8808
By default, the server reads the documentation for the system gem directory. To access the documentation for another directory, such as the private gem directory for your account, specify the gem directory with the -d option. For example:
gem server -d ~/.gem/ruby/1.8/
Press Ctrl-C to shutdown the server.
Accessing the Documentation from the Command-line
The ri utility provides access to documentation from the command-line. Simply type ri, followed by the name of item that you would information about. For clarity, ri requires that you specify a method in the form Class::method for class methods, and Class#method for instance methods.
ri Array
ri Array::new
ri Array#clear
The ri utility automatically checks a per-user ~/.rdoc directory, the Ruby system documentation directory for standard library documentation, the directory that RubyGems installs documentation into, and the site documentation directory that global installations of third-party software use. RubyGems automatically generates the documentation for any software that you install with the gem command.
To view a help document as HTML, use the -f option of ri to output it in HTML format, and then redirect the result:
ri -f html Array > array.html
Generating Documentation
The supplied rdoc utility reads Ruby source code files and extracts information from the comments to generate HTML documentation. Optionally, rdoc can generate help files for the ri command-line help system.
rdoc mycode/
rdoc code1.rb code2.rb
Useful rdoc options:
- -a – Document all methods, not just public methods.
- -d – Create class and module diagrams in the well-known dot file format.
- -o directory-name – Specify the output directory.
- -q – Process files silently.
- -ri – Generate ri documentation and install it in the user location.
- -ri-site – Generate ri documentation and install it in the site location.
- -ri-system – Generate ri documentation and install it in the system location.
The ERB Template System
The Ruby standard library includes a template system called ERB, which can you use to generate documents, Web pages, source code, or any other form of text. ERB is very tightly integrated with Ruby, and this enables it to be extremely powerful whilst remaining very simple to use.
The Rake Task Automation Utility
Technically, Rake is a build system. In practice, it is a convenient way to automate just about any small task.