CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railspluginsrubygems
Codebeef
Codebeef

Reputation: 43996

Build a Plugin or Gem?

Typically I create a plugin when I have a module that I know I'm going to need over again in my other projects, however, they could also be packaged as gems.

When should I be building a gem over creating a plugin? Is there any criteria for making the call?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 688

Answers (3)

remi
remi

Reputation:

you can add generators to rails via gems. it's actually pretty easy, you can just add a rails_generators directory to your gem. (i think other directory names will work - i'm not sure what rails searches for). example: http://github.com/remi/rackbox/tree/a21c21667c68d5fd51357e28f0742171e9161e9b/rails_generators

as for adding rake tasks ... i have yet to figure out howto do that :/

for now, i'm having my generators add require 'myproject/rails/tasks' (or something) to the project's Rakefile as a way to add rake tasks to rails from a gem.

a lot of gems ask you to 'bootstrap' them into your rails project, eg. sudo gem install cucumber cd rails_app ./script/generate cucumber # bootstrap cucumber into your app

Upvotes: 1

wvb
wvb

Reputation: 216

Rails seems to be moving towards the gem direction. I have converted most of my plugins to gems now. Gems are easier to manage and fit better in the Ruby eco-system. Why do we need two separate systems anyway?

There is still a problem with gems however: it is not possible to add rake tasks to a Rails application from a gem. Probably the same holds for generators, although I'm not sure. If you use these in your plugin, migrating to a gem is not yet possible. Hopefully this gets fixed soon.

Upvotes: 1

Matt Darby
Matt Darby

Reputation: 6324

Plugins are becoming obsolete now that you can manage gems via the "config.gem" statement in environment.rb. Gems are available system-wide (not just in one app), and are versioned unlike plugins.

I've converted all of my plugins to gems recently. Easy to do and well worth it.

Upvotes: 9

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