Should I enable RubyGems by default when installing ruby on Windows?

Question

I've decided to have a play around with ruby so I've downloaded the windows one click installer. One of the options in the installer which isn't selected by default is to "Enable RubyGems" which automatically enables RubyGems by pre-appending 'rubygems' to the RUBYOPT environment variable.

Being completely new to Ruby I must admit that I have no idea what that means in terms of the impact it will have as I start developing programs in Ruby.

For one, I don't know what Ruby Gems are...but I also don't know how critical they are to ruby development. Should I just enable them by default or should I wait until I find that I definitely need them?

Answer 1

RubyGems or simply gems are Ruby packages or libraries that you can install and use in your Ruby programs. So you definitely will need them at some point in time and therefore you should enable them. When you will see that you need to install gem named "xxx" then you just need to run from command line:

gem install xxx