Using Gems with MacRuby

Question

How do you use gems from a MacRuby .5 application on Snow Leopard? Do I need to specify the gem path? If so, how do I do this?

Best scenario is to package the gems inside the application so the user would not have to install them when the app is distributed.

Answer 1

To use gems in a MacRuby project you need to use:

$ sudo macgem install gem_name

Not all gems are compatible with MacRuby, yet.

Answer 2

Yehuda Katz gem bundler is a very good option IMHO:

http://github.com/wycats/bundler

Anyway, there are many other options such as creating a vendor/ directory in your app bundle adding each vendor subdir to the ruby library search path in rb_main.rb:

$:.unshift File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'vendor/rest-client/lib')
$:.unshift File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'vendor/crack/lib')
require 'rest-client'
require 'crack'

I'm using the latter approach here:

http://github.com/rubiojr/canasto