Writing own scaffold generator, exporting as a gem

Question

I have created my own scaffold generator, now it's sitting in my ~/.rails/generator/scaffold directory. How can I make a gem in order to use my generator along other machines I'm using, without the need of copying the ~/.rails folder on every box ? I will push later the gem on Github

Answer 1

From the documentation:

For a RubyGem, put your generator class and templates in the lib directory. For a Rails plugin, make a generators directory at the root of your plugin.

However that's a little vague.

From the Rails::Generator::Lookup source:

1. Rails application. If RAILS_ROOT is defined we know we're generating in the context of a Rails application, so search RAILS_ROOT/generators.

2. Look in plugins, either for generators/ or rails_generators/ directories within each plugin

3. User home directory. Search ~/.rails/generators.

4. RubyGems. Search for gems named *_generator, and look for generators within any RubyGem's /rails_generators/_generator.rb file.

5. Builtins. Model, controller, mailer, scaffold, and so on.

A single generator gem should be structured like this:

• my_scaffold_generator/
  • lib/
  • my_scaffold_generator.rb
  • required_file.rb
  • templates/
  • ...

Gems that contains multiple generators should be structured like this:

• my_cool_generators/
  • rails_generators/
  • cool_scaffold/
  • cool_scaffold_generator.rb
  • lib/
    • required_file.rb
    • ...
  • templates/
    • ...
  • cool_controller/
  • cool_controller_generator.rb
  • lib/
    • required_files.rb
    • ...
  • templates/
    • ...