From: Intransition <transfire@...>
Date: 2010-06-11T17:47:11+09:00
Subject: Re: creating a gem structure for command line program



On Jun 11, 3:55 am, "R.. Kumar" <sentinel1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Rein Henrichs wrote:
> > On 2010-06-11 00:15:24 -0700, R.. Kumar said:
>
> >> thx for help.
>
> > Put your executable in bin/ and any supporting code in lib/
>
> > Rubygems will take care of distributing your executable in the way you
> > mentioned, you don't have to do anything except add it to the gemspec.
>
> Thanks. I was looking at some other gems such as cheat and maruku, and I
> was going to model my command line progs on maruku.
>
> Last question, what about the lib/<project>.rb file. Usually it just
> contains some "require" statements. In my case, the file in bin
> (<project>.rb) already contains the includes. Do i keep an empty file,
> or just put the includes in there anyway.
>
> Thanks again for the immed response.

First, there's two overarching ways to go about this:

1) put exe code in a bin/<name> file
2) only put bootstrap code in bin/<name> to an lib/ file.

Either way is fine. I tend to use #2 because it has some small
advantages --all code is in one place, relative requires are safe
within lib/<name>/. To give you an example, a bin/foo might look like:

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
  require 'foo/main.rb'
  Foo.main(*ARGV)

And that's all. Then in lib/foo/main.rb you would define a Foo.main
method to handle command-line invocation.

And remember the advantages of encapsulation. Maruku's executables
lack this, so they cannot be reused, inherited, unit tested, etc.