Modifying other people’s Ruby gems

2015/10/10

It’s pretty easy to modify other people’s gems. They have have these things called “gemspecs,” which let you build a file that you can install with the gem command:

git clone https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-coffeescript.git
cd jekyll-coffeescript
# make some changes
gem build jekyll-coffeescript.gemspec
gem install jekyll-coffeescript-1.0.1.gem

I know this because I spent some time trying to make Jekyll 2 not need a JavaScript runtime. And I did that because I was gonna install Jekyll to make this site.

I thought I could get away without a JavaScript runtime by getting the pre-release version 3.0.0.pre.beta9. But it turns out that version doesn’t do dependencies right.

Anyway, go support my pull request for great dependency disentanglement.

My last post was about Meteor stuff. Have a look.