Should I host gems in GitHub or RubyGems?

Question

I've read that RubyGems is de-facto hosting for gems.

I host all my Rails projects on GitHub.

So my questions are:

• Are there any reasons for hosting my gems on GitHub and not RubyGems?

• Does RubyGems have private repositories like GitHub?

• I've read that jeweler is nice for creating gem skeleton. On their webpage it sounds like it uploads these gems to GitHub and not RubyGems. But didn't GitHub removed the Gem support?

• This railscast http://media.railscasts.com/videos/183_gemcutter_and_jeweler.mov shows us how to use gemcutter to manage gems. But Gemcutter.org is now RubyGems.org right? But still a gem called gemcutter is available? Is this managing gems for us but in RubyGems.org now?

Grateful if someone could enlighten me on this topic.

Answer 1

RubyGems.org is a host for gems not for source code repositories, which GitHub is. GitHub used to host gems too but they don't any more. You could always tell GitHub hosted gems because the gem name was prefixed with the author's GitHub user name. Most gem developers host their gems with RubyGems and keep the source on GitHub.

Answer 2

GitHub doesn't offer building or hosting new gems anymore, but suggests using RubyGems instead (see http://gems.github.com/).

Answer 3

Railscast 183 apparently was published in October 12, 2009. Later that month, github said you should use gemcutter (which is now rubygems.org) instead.

Information goes out of date really quickly in the ruby community. Sometimes people don't bother to warn you about that. :(

Answer 4

Are there any reasons for hosting my gems on GitHub and not RubyGems?

1) GitHub has stopped building new gems, but is continuing to host gems that were previously placed on the site.) The answer is, you can't. (

The GitHub gem building process was always kind of hacky and wasn't 100% solid. (check out the "gem issues" support queue on their help site sometime). GitHub's about git hosting, Gemcutter is about gem hosting. Enough said. :)

Does RubyGems have private repositories like GitHub?

Nope, not yet. We've considered it, but offering private gem servers/subdomains seems to conflict with the open nature of the site. If you need a gem server for your code that is internal, just use gem server or geminabox.

I've read that jeweler is nice for creating gem skeleton. On their webpage it sounds like it uploads these gems to GitHub and not RubyGems. But didn't GitHub removed the Gem support?

Jeweler's still a great way to get started creating a gem. I'm pretty sure rake release with Jeweler's rake tasks installed will just do a gem push now, so it will publish to RubyGems.org.

This railscast http://media.railscasts.com/videos/183_gemcutter_and_jeweler.mov shows us how to use gemcutter to manage gems. But Gemcutter.org is now RubyGems.org right? But still a gem called gemcutter is available? Is this managing gems for us but in RubyGems.org now?

Yep, gemcutter.org, rubygems.org, and gems.rubyforge.org all redirect to the same place. The gem push and gem owner commands are now in RubyGems proper, so you don't need the gemcutter gem to publish anymore. The gemcutter gem is still available and contains yet to be merged in commands, such as gem yank and gem webhook.

The full story on all of the transition changes is here.