This articles was published on 2013-01-04
After MASUI’s hard work of refactoring the complete build process, we have now a quite clean and easy way to create a GEM for mruby. On the other side it is still quite hard to get an overview of all available GEMs. To solve this problem I built a small tool called mgem.
The installation is straight forward, just execute:
$ gem install mgem
And you have the command mgem available on your command line.
You can search and find GEMs with the mgem command. For example the amount of all available GEMs can be seen with this command:
$ mgem size Total # of GEMs: 7
To list all available GEMs you can hit:
$ mgem list List of all GEMs: mruby-curl CURL HTTP Client mruby-http HTTP Parser mruby-json JavaScript Object Notation mruby-md5 MD5 Hash Alghorithm mruby-sqlite3 SQLite3 Database mruby-uv libuv interface mruby-v8 V8 JavaScript Engine
To activate a GEM you do:
$ mgem list active List of active GEMs: $ mgem add mruby-sqlite3 'mruby-sqlite3' activated! List of active GEMs: [X] mruby-sqlite3 SQLite3 Database
To generate a build configuration which contains all active GEMs type:
$ mgem config MRuby::Build.new do |conf| conf.cc = ENV['CC'] || 'gcc' conf.ld = ENV['LD'] || 'gcc' conf.ar = ENV['AR'] || 'ar' conf.cflags << (ENV['CFLAGS'] || %w(-g -O3 -Wall -Werror-implicit-function-declaration)) conf.ldflags << (ENV['LDFLAGS'] || %w(-lm)) conf.gem :git => 'https://github.com/mattn/mruby-sqlite3.git' end
For a detailed information about a specific GEM you enter:
$ mgem info mruby-curl Detail information of 'mruby-curl': Name: mruby-curl Author: mattn Description: CURL HTTP Client Website: https://github.com/mattn/mruby-curl Repository: https://github.com/mattn/mruby-curl.git Protocol: git
You have to update from time to time the GEM list database:
$ mgem update Update list of GEMs... DONE!
And for further information about the mgem command:
$ mgem help mgem (Version 0.0.2) is a library manager for mruby Usage: mgem size How many GEMs are available? mgem list [active] List GEMs mgem info *pattern* Show detail information about a GEM mgem add *name* Activate a GEM mgem rm *name* De-Activate a GEM mgem search *pattern* Search for GEMs mgem config Generate a mruby build config including all active GEMs mgem update Update the list of GEMs Website: https://github.com/bovi/mgem
To maintain a list of GEMs I created a repository called mgem-list. This repository contains a yaml file for each GEM. If you want to add your GEM to this list just send me a pull request or create an issue. Just take an existing file as a reference. I know that this is not the optimal solution but at the moment I don’t even know if anybody else than me needs such a tool. So if you think it is useful, send me a link to your mruby GEM and I add it to the system. If you have a better idea of how to manage the GEMs I’m also interested in it.