Private Gem Server Using Geminabox

The Problem

At HealPay, we were starting to develop a lot of internal gems to handle the business logic of our applications separate from our web applications. We were also creating some re-usable code that we didn’t necessarily want to open source (at least yet). We needed something that could sustain our use of rubygems without us having to create a private rubygems server for gem distribution.

The Solution

Enter Gem in a Box - Really simple rubygem hosting. It lets you host your own gems, and push new gems to it just like with rubygems.org.

Gem in a Box includes a simple web app and command line client. The clean web interface lets you view your published gems and the command line comes bolted on when you install the gem. Pushing new changes for a gem are as easy as running this command:

gem inabox pkg/mygem-0.0.1.gem --host myprivategemserver.com

To automate the task of pushing to my private gem server, I created a Rake task that has all of the standard gem building tasks but with the inabox command twist.

require 'rubygems'
require 'rubygems/package_task'
require 'bundler/setup'

def gemspec
  $mygem_gemspec ||= Gem::Specification.load("mygem.gemspec")
end

task :gem => :gemspec

desc %{Validate the gemspec file.}
task :gemspec do
  gemspec.validate
end

desc "Build but don't install gem"
task :build => :gemspec do
  sh "mkdir -p pkg"
  sh "gem build mygem.gemspec"
  sh "mv mygem-#{MyGem::VERSION}.gem pkg"
end

desc "Release new version of gem to HP Gem Server"
task :release => :build do
  sh "gem inabox pkg/mygem-#{MyGem::VERSION}.gem --host #{ENV['HPGEMS_URL']}" # See below for a description of the HPGEMS_URL 
end

desc "Install the gem"
task :install => :build do
  sh "gem install pkg/mygem-#{MyGem::VERSION}.gem"
end

The HPGEMS_URL environment variable needs to be set on your servers (usually in your bashrc) to the url where you installed the geminabox server. Then you can simply add this to the Gemfile if your gems:

source :rubygems
source ENV["HPGEMS_URL"] if ENV["HPGEMS_URL"]
gemspec

And example of the .bashrc file might look like this:

export HPGEMS_URL=myprivategemserver.com

When you run bundle install on your gems, it will look for dependencies at rubygems.org and your private gem server.

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