Waldo is a repo meant to show you the process of making your own Ruby gem. In this scenario we're making the gem called waldo. When you go about making your own, your name will have to be unique, and you'll need to swap out the information that is unique to yourself and your gem. Overall I wanted to be as transparent as I could about the process to show that it's not something to stress about and to give it a try!

If you haven't done so already, this would be a great time to make yourself a GitHub account and a RubyGems.org account. These will be used later in the tutorial.

This step is optional if you already have it, but will be required for this tutorial.

$ gem install bundler

$ bundle gem waldo

Creating gem 'waldo'...
MIT License enabled in config
Code of conduct enabled in config
      create  waldo/Gemfile
      create  waldo/.gitignore
      create  waldo/lib/waldo.rb
      create  waldo/lib/waldo/version.rb
      create  waldo/waldo.gemspec
      create  waldo/Rakefile
      create  waldo/README.md
      create  waldo/bin/console
      create  waldo/bin/setup
      create  waldo/LICENSE.txt
      create  waldo/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
Initializing git repo in /waldo

Modify the gemspec to your specifications

# coding: utf-8
lib = File.expand_path('../lib', __FILE__)
$LOAD_PATH.unshift(lib) unless $LOAD_PATH.include?(lib)
require 'waldo/version'

Gem::Specification.new do |spec|
  spec.name          = "waldo"
  spec.version       = Waldo::VERSION
  spec.authors       = ["Austin Trout"]
  spec.email         = ["[trouta23@gmail.com]"]

  spec.summary       = %q{Waldo is used to learn about making your own gem}
  spec.homepage      = "https://github.com/trouta23/waldo"
  spec.license       = "MIT"

  spec.files         = `git ls-files -z`.split("\x0").reject { |f| f.match(%r{^(test|spec|features)/}) }
  spec.bindir        = "exe"
  spec.executables   = spec.files.grep(%r{^exe/}) { |f| File.basename(f) }
  spec.require_paths = ["lib"]

  spec.add_development_dependency "bundler", "~> 2.0.2"
  spec.add_development_dependency "rake", "~> 10.0"
end

/.bundle/
/.yardoc
/Gemfile.lock
/_yardoc/
/coverage/
/doc/
/pkg/
/spec/reports/
/tmp/
*.gem

For example, in lib/waldo.rb:

require "waldo/version"

module Waldo
  def self.where_are_you
    puts "It's a secret!"
  end
end

Create a new repo, and follow the steps to push to the new GitHub repo.

The exact steps to do so are not in this tutorial.

This is what you'll see initially:

Welcome! This gem is meant to act as a introduction on how to make your own gem from scratch. In this directory, you'll find the files you need to be able to package up your Ruby library into a gem. Put your Ruby code in the file lib/waldo. To experiment with that code, run bin/console for an interactive prompt.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'waldo'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install waldo

• Open up a console: bin/console
• Call Waldo.where_are_you
• You should expect to see: It's a secret! returned

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/waldo. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

$ gem build waldo.gemspec

Successfully built RubyGem
Name: waldo
Version: 0.1.0
File: waldo-0.1.0.gem

You'll want to base it off your File name seen in the gemspec

$ gem install ./waldo-0.1.0.gem

Successfully installed waldo-0.1.0
Parsing documentation for waldo-0.1.0
Installing ri documentation for waldo-0.1.0
Done installing documentation for waldo after 0 seconds
1 gem installed

$ irb

>> require 'waldo'
=> true
>> Waldo.where_are_you
It's a secret!

On your RubyGems profile, go to the edit view and down under the API ACCESS section you'll see a version of the command below:

$ curl -u {username} https://rubygems.org/api/v1/api_key.yaml > ~/.gem/credentials; chmod 0600 ~/.gem/credentials

Run this command as this will give you access to gem commands from the command line. Located here: http://guides.rubygems.org/command-reference/

When you run this command you'll get prompted for your key which will also be located under API ACCESS and say:

Your API key is {your_key_here}.

$ bundle install

Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/
Fetching version metadata from https://rubygems.org/
Resolving dependencies...
Installing rake 10.5.0
Using bundler 2.0.2
Using waldo 0.1.0 from source at `.`
Bundle complete! 3 Gemfile dependencies, 3 gems now installed.
Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

$ bundle exec rake release

waldo 0.1.0 built to pkg/waldo-0.1.0.gem.
Tagged v0.1.0.
Pushed git commits and tags.
Pushed waldo 0.1.0 to rubygems.org.

Go check out your new gem on RubyGems.org!

As more details are found that would be useful and not too advanced they'll be added to the repo. Also feel free to submit your own!