GemDating

gem_dating is a library for determining the relative age of a set of gems.

The primary use case is when evaluating a codebase for upgrades - a gem from 2017 may effectively be abandoned and could cause trouble if you're targeting an upgrade to Ruby 4.1

gem_dating avoids utilizing Bundler, and intends to be useful where you want to evaluate a set of gems without the overhead of a full bundle install. If you've got a valid bundle you should consider the built in bundle-outdated, or other available tools for interacting with your Gemfile, like libyear-bundler.

If you have rubygems 3.4.8 or later installed, you can skip installation and just run via gem exec gem_dating [[path/to/Gemfile]

gem install gem_dating or add it to your Gemfile:

gem 'gem_dating', group: [:development], require: false

This gem provides a small command line interface. It may be invoked with:

$ gem_dating

By default, GemDating will look for a Gemfile in the current directory. If it finds one, it will output a list of gems and their relative ages to the stdout stream.

You may also pass a path to a Gemfile as an argument:

$ gem_dating ~/code/my_app/Gemfile

GemDating leans on $stdout, so you can pipe the output to a file if you'd like:

$ gem_dating ~/code/my_app/Gemfile > ~/code/my_app/gem_ages.txt

TablePrint formats the output to something like this:

NAME        | VERSION | DATE
------------|---------|-----------
rest-client | 2.1.0   | 2019-08-21
rails       | 7.0.5   | 2023-05-24
graphql     | 2.0.22  | 2023-05-17

gem_dating also includes some other useable patterns, if you invoke it within an IRB session. It currently supports passing in a string of a gem name, or a path to a Gemfile. You can then parse those to an array of Gem::Specifications, a minimal hash, or the Table output you'd see in the CLI.

# irb
# #:001 >

require "gem_dating"

dating = GemDating.from_string("rails")

more_dating = GemDating.from_file("path/to/Gemfile")


dating.to_a
# => [Gem::Specification.new do |s|
# s.name = "rails"
# s.version = Gem::Version.new("7.0.5")
# s.installed_by_version = Gem::Version.new("0") ...etc

dating.to_h
# =>  {"rails"=>{"name"=>"rails", "version"=>"7.0.5", "date"=>"2023-05-24"}}

more_dating.table_print
# =>
# NAME        | VERSION | DATE
# ------------|---------|-----------
# rails       | 7.0.5   | 2023-05-24
# ...etc

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