What are the "Must Have" Ruby Gems

Question

I am relatively new to ruby, and I've been amazed with some of the Gems available. Sinatra comes to mind (one of the simplest ways to create working RESTful interfaces I've ever seen).

So I was wondering, what are some of the coolest or most amazing Gems my fellow programmers have found, that a newbie Ruby guy should look at. Im not looking to solve a specific problem I am having, it more about getting answers to a problem I never knew I had (if you follow my meaning).

What are your suggestions?

Answer 1

I tend to use ActiveMerchant and Paperclip a lot in my Rails apps.

Answer 2

I'm of the "don't get it until you need it" philosophy.

That said, there are a couple gems that I keep using:

• Hpricot - parse HTML easily
• daemons - run your code as a daemon

Answer 3

Here are some of my favorites:

• RedCloth - Textile (easy markup) to HTML
• AuthLogic - User Authentication
• Shoulda - Testing
• WillPaginate - Pagination
• Capistrano - Remote multi-server automation tool
• HappyMapper - Object to XML mapping library
• Httparty - For consuming RESTful web services
• Mechanize - Automated web interaction
• Nokogiri - HTML, XML, SAX, and Reader parser with XPath and CSS selector support

Answer 4

fastthread, rails, sinatra, my own gem, rspec all come to mind.

Answer 5

I've been using Mechanize a lot lately. It comes in handy more often than you might realize initially. Wirble is also amazing.

Answer 6

• rake
• autotest (zentest)
• rspec
• shoulda
• cucumber
• webrat
• machinist

Answer 7

Ramaze is ramazing. If you like Sinatra, you may like Ramaze even more. Sinatra gets all the press these days but Ramaze has actually been around longer.

Answer 8

The ones the READMEs of the projects you're using tells you to install.

Answer 9

General

• Rake — This should come pre-installed with rubygems, must have tool
• Daemons — Run ruby code as a daemon
• Haml — Awesome alternative to raw HTML
• Hpricot — HTML parser
• Rdiscount — Markdown parser
• Capistrano — Very nice deployment tool

Testing

• Rspec — Testing framework
• Cucumber — Integration testing
• Factory-girl — Fixtures replacement
• Autotest — Runs your tests in the background

Rails plugins

• Restful_authentication
• Will_paginate
• Exception_notification
• Paperclip
• Acts_as_taggable_on_steroids
• In_place_editing
• Acts_as_list
• Active_merchant

Answer 10

• rak: search for a string pattern in your code
• rcov: code coverage statistics for your tests, in nice html
• flay and flog: to see which parts of your code suck the most

Answer 11

• shoulda
• zentest
• redgreen
• rcov
• passenger

and of course:

• json

Answer 12

Sinatra is the simplest way to make a web app with Ruby.

EDIT: Code sample:

require "sinatra"
get '/' do
    "Hello, world!"
end
get '/:name/?' do
    "Hello, #{params[:name]}!"
end

In this case, running your program and then going to / will output Hello, world and /dave, with or without a trailing slash, would output Hello, dave!

Answer 13

Check out http://ruby-toolbox.com/. They categorize ruby projects and break them down by most watched projects on GitHub. Pretty useful for finding good gems within each problem domain.

Answer 14

Friendly_id It allows you to create pretty URL’s and work with human-friendly strings as if they were numeric ids for ActiveRecord models.

Answer 15

[whenever] - define cron tasks in ruby DSL