How to make a Ruby gem executable

Question

I can use gems like RSpec or Rails or Pry by calling their respective gem names, e.g. rspec, rails, pry on the commandline. How can I achieve this with gems I create? I'm using bundler for the basic gem creation.

Answer 1

To make your gem executable in CLI, you should set the followings up.

1. Place your executable file the bin folder, like bin/hello
2. Make that executable by set permissions (chmod u+x bin/hello)
3. Set up gemspec configuration accordingly (hello.gemspec)

spec.files  = `git ls-files -Z`.split("\x0")
spec.bindir = 'bin'
spec.executables << 'hello'

spec.executables considers bin as default folder for binaries and executables, though you can change it.

You can find documentation about this here: Gemspec#executables.

Answer 2

According to documentation of Gemspec file you must put your executable in bin/ folder.