Ruby Gems
Filed under Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ruby Frameworks, Back-end Development, All Pages
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Ruby gems are modular libraries that are meant to be sort of plug-and-play for Ruby projects and apps. Many are meant for or compatible with Rails.
Check out Awesome Ruby which shows different gems in groups and compares them (since many gems are out there to support the same features).
Building your own
- RailsCasts: build a new gem with bundler, probably the easiest way to get started
- RubyGems’s own guide and documentation for building a new gem. (That’s the site that aggregates them and from where you download gems via the
gem install [gem_name]command.)
Especially good to know
- pry, possibly the best Ruby debugger tool out there right now.
- unirest, helping you make very clean http requests without the headache of Net::HTTP syntax, and as an alternative to HTTParty
A general list
- emittr, an event listener.
- github_api gem, a Ruby wrapper for making requests to the official Github API.
- soda-ruby, a gem to parse Government Open Data.
- destroyed_at: adds awesome functionality for a Rails app; instead of actually destroying a record of something, it’s instead marked as destroyed, so you can restore it if needed.
- materialize-sass, Google’s Materialize CSS framework in SASS format.
- google_visualr: “A Ruby Gem for the Google Visualization API. Write Ruby code. Generate Javascript. Display a Google Chart.”