Menu
I've been out of the Ruby world for a while (3 years), but I'm coming back for a project. I am now overwhelmed by all the gems available. Is there a list of gems by popularity/best gems? And where is the current list of all the gems?
560
RoR Gems make development with Rails worthwhile. Gems in Rails are libraries that allow any Ruby on Rails developer to add functionalities without writing code. You can also call Ruby on Rails gems as plugins for adding features. A Ruby gem enables adding features without creating the code again and again.
The main place where libraries are hosted is RubyGems.org, a public repository of gems that can be searched and installed onto your machine. You may browse and search for gems using the RubyGems website, or use the gem command. Using gem search -r , you can search RubyGems' repository.
I don't know about "best," but if you want to see a list of commonly used gems for various purposes, I've found The Ruby Toolbox to be a great resource. The rankings are determined by counting up the number of forks and watchers of various github projects, so I'd view it less as "this is what I should be using," and more as "these are some things I should check out." At the very least, they're all likely to be under active development and fairly up to date, and it's very useful to see groups of gems broken down by category.
To get a list of all gems from a particular source, you can use gem list --remote, as August points out. Rubyforge (which is your default source) and github are definitely the two most-used.
193
Ruby gems is a package manager for ruby projects. There is no such thing as "best" gems. Perhaps most used, but not "best".
For a list of all the gems on rubygems.org, try gem list --remote. You can also try gem list --remote --source=http://gems.github.com/, since github is a popular gem distribution source as well.
37
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
