GirFFI

by Matijs van Zuijlen

Ruby bindings for GNOME using the GObject Introspection Repository.

• Create bindings to any GObject-based library.
• Bindings are generated at runtime.
• Provides overridden bindings for selected methods.
• Install gir_ffi-gtk and require gir_ffi-gtk2 or gir_ffi-gtk3 to load overrides for Gtk2 or Gtk3.

require 'gir_ffi'

# Set up the namespace you wish to use
GirFFI.setup :Gio

# Create an object
inet_address = Gio::InetAddress.new_from_string "127.0.0.1"

# Call some methods on the object
inet_address.is_loopback    # => true
inet_address.is_multicast   # => false

# Call a function in the namespace
Gio.dbus_is_name "foo"   # => false

See the documentation for more usage information.

Have a look in the examples/ directory for some simple examples. More examples can be found in the repositories for gir_ffi-gtk and gir_ffi-gst.

gem install gir_ffi

GirFFI is supported on CRuby 2.7, 3.0 and 3.1.

You will also need gobject-introspection installed with some introspection data.

Depending on the GIR data, GirFFI needs the actual libraries to be available under the name ending in plain .so. If GirFFI complains that it cannot find the library, try installing development packages for those libraries.

GirFFI should work with gobject-introspection 1.56.0 and up, and glib 2.56.0 and up.

On Debian and Ubuntu, installing libgirepository-1.0-1 and gir1.2-glib-2.0 should be enough to use GirFFI in your application.

To run the tests, you should additionally install libgirepository1.0-dev, gobject-introspection, libcairo2-dev, gir1.2-gtop-2.0, gir1.2-gtk-3.0, gir1.2-pango-1.0, gir1.2-gtksource-3.0, gir1.2-secret-1 and gir1.2-gstreamer-1.0. This should be enough to get rake test working.

GirFFI has not been tested on Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows. YMMV. Pull requests to support these platforms are welcome.

Sometimes, the GIR data is incorrect, or not detailed enough, and a reasonable binding cannot be created automatically. For these cases, overrides can be defined. The following gems with overrides already exist:

• gir_ffi-gtk: overrides for Gtk+ 2 and 3.
• gir_ffi-gnome_keyring: overrides for GnomeKeyring
• gir_ffi-cairo: overrides for Cairo
• gir_ffi-pango: overrides for Pango
• gir_ffi-tracker: overrides for Tracker
• gir_ffi-gst: overrides for GStreamer

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for contribution guidelines.

The following people have contributed to GirFFI over the years:

• John Cupitt
• Marius Hanne
• Antonio Terceiro
• Matijs van Zuijlen

Copyright © 2009–2022 Matijs van Zuijlen

GirFFI is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later. See the file COPYING.LIB for more information.