Trying to build a gem, getting a Gem::InvalidSpecificationException: "[...] are not files"

Question

I'm trying to build a custom gem I wrote called client_package but it is failing.

My directory structure looks like this:

client_package     Gemfile     Gemfile.lock     client_package.gemspec     Rakefile     Readme.md     .gitignore     .git         ...git files...     lib         client_package.rb         client_package             version.rb             api.rb             ...more... 

And my client_package.gemspec looks like this:

# encoding: UTF-8 require File.expand_path('../lib/client_package/version', __FILE__)  Gem::Specification.new do |s|     s.name = 'client_package'     s.version = ClientPackage::VERSION     s.platform = Gem::Platform::RUBY      s.files = `git ls-files`.split('\n')     s.executables = `git ls-files -- bin/*`.split('\n').map{ |f| File.basename(f) }     s.require_paths = ['lib']      # also have s.authors, s.email, s.homepage, s.summary, s.description      s.add_dependency 'httparty'     s.add_dependency 'json' end 

And all my files are committed and the git state is clean.

From within the top client_package directory, I run gem build client_package.gemspec and get this error:

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::InvalidSpecificationException)     [".gitignore Gemfile Rakefile Readme.md client_package.gemspec lib/client_package.rb lib/client_package/api.rb lib/client_package/version.rb lib/client_package/...more... "] are not files 

This is puzzling to me, because those certainly seem to be files to me. Anyway, I figured there is some path problem if it's not seeing these files, and just doing some trial and error I discovered that if I go up a directory (one above the top-level client_package) and then run gem build client_package/client_package.gemspec it does appear to work at first, creating the file client_package-1.0.0.gem. But something is still wrong. If I then install that gem with gem install client_package-1.0.0.gem that also appears to work. But then this:

require 'rubygems' require 'client_package' 

Returns LoadError: no such file to load -- client_package.

I feel like I must be missing something small but important. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Excuses for resurrecting this old thread, but I found another cause: if you did not check in git, some old (deleted files) might interfere: on disk they do not exist, but git ls-files migh report them as being included in the gem.

Check in the files and this exact error is over.