At makandra, we've built a few gems over the years. Some of these are quite popular: spreewald (> 1M downloads), active_type (> 1M downloads), and geordi (> 200k downloads)

Developing a Ruby gem is different from developing Rails applications, w...

The way MySQL's FULLTEXT tokenizer splits text into word tokens might not always be what you need. E.g. it splits a word at period characters.

Since the tokenizer has near-zero configuration options (minimum word length and stopwords list), you n...

You can use local copies of gems in your Gemfile like this:

gem 'spreewald', path: '~/gems/spreewald'

As soon as you have bundled your project with the local copy of the gem, all code changes in the copy will be available on your pro...

When you need information about a gem (like version(s) or install path(s)), you can use the gem binary from the command line, or the Gem API inside a ruby process at runtime.

gem binary (in a terminal)

You can get some information abou...

We currently test most of our gems on Travis CI, but want to migrate those tests to Github Actions. This is a step-by-step guide on how to do this.

Note that this guide requires the gem to use gemika.

1. Go...

The problem

Calling bundle update GEMNAME will update a lot more gems than you think. E.g. when you do this:

bundle update cucumber-rails

... you might think this will only update cucumber-rails. But it actually **updates cucumber...

The way Rational#to_s works on Ruby has changed from Ruby 1.9 on. Here is how to get the old behavior back.

You may want this for things where Rationals are being used, like when subtracting Date objects from one another.

What's happening?...

While it might seem trivial to implement an invoice that sums up items and shows net, gross and vat totals, it actually involves a lot of rules and caveats. It is very easy to create invoices where numbers don't add up and a few cents are missing....

Add deprecation warnings and their solution or link to available solutions.

Global access to Rake DSL methods is deprecated. Please include Rake::DSL into classes and modules which use the Rake DSL methods.
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Unfortunately vanilla Ruby modules lack support for many idioms popular in modern Ruby. Most importantly, we have become accustomed to composing our classes with meta-programming macros such as has_many, validates_presence_of or after_save. And mo...