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I'm writing an IDE in Ruby, and I'm stumped on how to get all my files to get "required" when I run the program on the command line, AND when its installed as a Rubygem.

My Rubygem has an executable file named "vr" in it. I need to make this "vr" executable file "require" all the other files from my project.

When I'm developing, its easy to require all my project's files. I simply "require" a relative path to them like this:

require_all Dir.glob(File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__)) + "/../bin/**/*.rb")

The require_all gem will work perfectly. However, I get a big problem when I install this program as a rubygem. When my "vr" executable is installed by rubygems, it copies the "vr" executable to a special directory:

/home/eric/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125/bin

This directory is totally separated from my project's root folder. And so all my project's files are no longer found by the "require" statement.

Rubygems makes this directory for my gem's root:

/home/eric/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125/visualruby-0.0.55

I need to be able to "require" all the files from that directory into my project.

My solution so far, is to make a second file called "visualruby.rb" that resides in my project's lib folder. It has the require_all statement in it to require all the project files. Then I just have to link the executable to it by adding this code to my "vr" executable file:

base_file = File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/lib/visualruby.rb'
if File.file?(base_file) 
  require base_file  #load from project
else
  require 'visualruby.rb'  #load from gem
end

It is necessary to check if there's a file named "visualruby.rb" relative to the current file because when I'm developing, it will always find the installed gem's version of "visualruby.rb" So when I make a change to a file, it has no effect. I have to force it to load the version from my development project for changes to work.

Also, my IDE creates projects from scratch, so it would be nice to know the general solution to this. I'd like to have a consistent project file system for all projects, but I'm not sure that's possible. I had the general solution of making a file called "requires.rb" for all projects, but I don't think it will work because every project will have the same filename added to the $LOAD_PATH.

Please help me understand how I can make a consistent file structure where I can develop, and make rubygems.

user1182000
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1 Answers1

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I found the answer to my own question:

The problem was that I was installing my rubygems using the rubygems API:

Gem::Installer.new(file_name)

This created syslinks that messed up my paths. There is an option to make wrappers instead of syslinks and that seems to be the standard way to install:

Gem::Installer.new(file_name, :wrappers => true)

Now the a wrapper is copied to my gem's bin directory and it uses the correct path. Now I can have a universal file that can be made into a gem. And everything runs the same in development and in the gem.

A happy ending...

user1182000
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