Deployment: Publishing Engines

21.1.1. Public? RubyGems!

If you want to share your engine with the world, your life will be easy as pie. That’s what karma is all about, right? If you are ready to share it, you can just use RubyGems. That’s it!

RubyGems stores all gems for free, and you can upload yours there too. Anyone will be able to use it and see your code, so if that’s not a problem for you, go for it!

Unfortunately, sharing your gems is not always possible. Even if you want to, you might not have permission to share your code. The corporate world doesn’t like it when you share their secrets! That’s understandable, so we need another solution… but don’t expect it to be free (it’s fine, the company will pay…).

21.1.2. Private? Pick one

Lucky us… if RubyGems can do it, why can’t we? Other people have thought about this too, and that’s probably how Gemfury was born.

• Gemfury

Gemfury gives you a gem server where you can store private and public gems, and you control if you want a gem to be public or remain private. Unfortunately, Gemfury is not free; you pay per user for any private gems.

• Make Your Own

So if Gemfury is too pricey for you, how about making our own? It will have a cost too, but it is going to be a small flat fee. The only thing we will need is a server. Any cheap provider like Digital Ocean or Linode will do. The server will just store packaged gems and send them when someone runs the bundle install command. Nothing too intense. All we need is for it to be accessible remotely.

Got a server? Good! But we still have to set up a gem server. The good news is that some people have created useful gems that we can use to set up a gem server (irony at its best). We will show you how to build a private gem server with Gem in a Box on a Digital Ocean Droplet. You can get a server and follow the steps, but honestly, it’s not that hard, so reading should be enough to understand how it works.

You can use any server that you have access to. If you want to get your own Digital Ocean Droplet, you can sign up here. This is an affiliate link and you will get a credit of $10 if you use it. This means you can try building your private gem server for free! (Devblast will also get a commission if you become a regular user.)

Let’s get started!

21.2.1. Setting up Geminabox

Thanks to this neat little gem, Gem in a Box, we can easily create a simple gem server. The following commands will be run from a Digital Ocean Droplet, and we will use RVM to install Ruby. We will put the Gem in a Box web application in /var/www/gemserver and store the actual gems in /var/devblast/gems/ (Don’t forget that this is our personal server and nobody else has access to it).

\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby

source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm

rvm requirements

gem install geminabox --no-doc

mkdir /var/www/gemserver

mkdir home/your_folder/gems

touch /var/www/gemserver/config.ru

require "rubygems"
require "geminabox"

Geminabox.data = "/home/your_folder/gems" # ... or wherever

use Rack::Auth::Basic, "Blast Secret Gem Server" do |username, password|
  username == 'blast' && password == 'A_VERY_SECRET_KEY'
end

run Geminabox::Server

use Rack::Auth::Basic, "Blast Secret Gem Server" do |username, password|
 username == 'blast' && password == 'A_VERY_SECRET_KEY'
end

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/gemserver

gem install puma

puma --port 9292 config.ru -d

Step 13: Access our gem server

And that’s it, we’ve got ourselves a private gem server!

Figure 1

21.2.2. Pushing gems to your private gem server

So how do we push gems now? Let’s push the Core module to see how it works. The following commands can be run from your local computer.

First, navigate to blast_crm/engines/core.

gem build blast_core.gemspec

gem inabox -c

gem inabox blast_core-0.0.1.gem

rm blast_core-0.0.1.gem

gem sources -a http://blast:A_VERY_SECRET_KEY@[your_server]:9292/

gem install blast_core

21.2.3. Bundle install your gems

We just added our gem server as a source for the rubygems gem. Now, let’s see how we can load gems in your Rails application using Bundle.

source "https://rubygems.org"
source "http://blast:A_VERY_SECRET_KEY@[your_server]:9292"
.
.
.

EDITOR=vi rails credentials:edit

gem_server_key: A_VERY_SECRET_KEY

source "https://rubygems.org"
source "http://blast:#{Rails.application.credentials.gem_server_key}@blast.com:9292"
.
.
.

.
.
.
gem 'blast_core'

bundle update

21.2.4. Pushing all our modules

Now that our private Gem server is ready, it’s time to push our modules! But first, let’s update the versions. We’re going to update all our modules to 1.0.0 and officially release them! Do the four following steps for each module: Core, Contacts and Tasks and replace {module} with the appropriate module name.

module Blast
  module Core
    VERSION = '1.0.0'
  end
end

gem build blast_{module}.gemspec

gem inabox blast_{module}-1.0.0.gem

rm blast_{module}-1.0.0.gem

21.3.1. Next Step

Next, we will learn how to create our own gem server.