From: Chad Fowler <chadfowler@...>
Date: 2005-08-10T20:41:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Update installed gems

On 8/9/05, Dale Martenson <dmartenson@multitech.com> wrote:
> 
> ---- Original message from Ezra Zygmuntowicz  on 8/9/2005 12:28 PM:
> 
> > On Aug 9, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Dale Martenson wrote:
> >
> >> I build my own gems as a way to distribute a variety of utilities
> >> where I work. What is the best way to install updates?
> >>
> >> If I distribute a new gem file, provided by email/ftp/web how can a
> >> user install the update? Should they just re-install? "gem update
> >> <blah>" doesn't seem to have a "--local" option. If you place the
> >> file in your current directory, it seems to be ignored and I am not
> >> sure how to specify a gem update file. While "gem install" will
> >> automatically look both for the gem locally and remotely, "gem
> >> update" doesn't.
> >>
> >> Maybe, this is a bad question since "gem update" is meant to look
> >> for updates that are not locally available. But this doesn't seem
> >> consistent with the way "gem install works".
> >>
> >> How difficult is it to implement a simple gem server?
> >
> >
> > $ gem_server
> > On the command line. This serves you rdoc documentation and it can
> > act as a local gem repository server. I've never set up the local
> > repo so perhaps someone else can chime in./ But it already has
> > features to do exactly what you want.
> >
> I will give that a try, but it seems like it is meant to serve your
> installed gems. If someone wanted to host and variety of gems (different
> versions of gems -- stable, bleeding edge, etc.), I don't think
> "gem_server" is the answer. Any ideas what is? Or am I understanding
> this incorrectly.
> 
> 

Hi.  gem_server can definitely do what you want.   You can serve gems
from an alternate directory (with the -d param) if you want to include
a lot of bleeding edge gems that you don't want "installed" on the
host system.  Also, if you look in the rubygems distribution under the
"bin" directory, you'll find generate_yaml_index.rb, which you can
use to create a static yaml file that you could serve with your web
server of choice.  So you'd have:

http://yourserver.whatever.org/yaml
and
http://youserver.whatever.org/gems/mygems.gem

If you have that structure available,  you can serve gems from a
normal web server.

-- 
Chad Fowler
http://chadfowler.com
http://rubycentral.org 
http://rubygarden.org 
http://rubygems.rubyforge.org (over 700,000 gems served!)