CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyruby-on-rails-3ruby-on-rails-3.1rubygems
Kyle Decot
Kyle Decot

Reputation: 20815

Ruby gem naming conventions

I'm creating a ruby gem and I've noticed that there doesn't seem to be (to my knowledge) a naming convention for gems. For example, I've seen both:

gem 'foo-bar'
gem 'foo_bar'

Is there some kind of definitive guide/convention for the naming of ruby gems?

Upvotes: 42

Views: 7726

Answers (4)

iain
iain

Reputation: 16274

The dashed version is for extensions on other frameworks, like rspec-rails and the underscore is for part of the normal gem name and should be camelcased in your classes.

So if you have a gem named foo_bar, the class/module should be named FooBar. If that gem should have a rails extension which ships as a different gem, it should be called foo_bar-rails and the module should be called FooBar::Rails and it should be required as require "foo_bar/rails"

This convention is also what Bundler tries to require.

Admittedly, this convention is not always followed. jquery_rails should actually be jquery-rails and factory_girl_rails should be called factory_girl-rails. But hey, not everything is perfect.

RubyGems convention docs:

Upvotes: 70

tjstankus
tjstankus

Reputation: 1101

Turns out that this is answered pretty clearly and succinctly in the rubygems docs: http://guides.rubygems.org/name-your-gem/

(This may be a recent doc addition because I recall searching for this info in the past and not finding it.)

Upvotes: 5

fguillen
fguillen

Reputation: 38772

In a recommendation of @svenfuchs:

  • underscore => camelized
  • hyphen => name::space

https://twitter.com/svenfuchs/status/135773593526206464

But it's true that I still see non-coherence behaviors like:

gem 'my_gem`, :require => 'my-gem'

https://twitter.com/#!/svenfuchs/status/135784542819713024

Upvotes: 4

tadman
tadman

Reputation: 211560

The one advantage is the convention of collapsing foo_bar into module or class FooBar as far as autoloaders go. foo-bar doesn't have a default equivalent.

Generally the underscore version is preferable from a require perspective, but the dashed version does come across as more readable so it tends to get used often.

Upvotes: 4

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