jim, a build and release tool for pure-Ruby gems

jim is a minimal tool for building and (eventually) publishing pure-Ruby gems.

Features:

• signs in to a gem host
• builds gems
• cleans up after itself (if you ask it to)
• will eventually be able to publish gems
• packing an entire (pure-Ruby) gem into a single file

Things jim is not going to do:

• jim will not support gems with native extensions.
• jim will not handle every edge case.
• jim will not manage locally-installed gems.

If you like jim and use Python, be sure to check out bork.

Installation

I'm hoping to provide single-file executables that bundle the entire gem, akin to Python's ZipApps.

Usage

The basic commands you will need are:

• jim signin / jim signout: sign in or out of a gem host.
• jim build: build a gem, with the output in ./build/.
• jim clean: removes things created by jim build.

More advanced features:

• jim pack: pack an entire gem into ./build/pack/#{gem_name}.rb.

Eventually, there will also be:

• jim push: push the specified gem to the configured host.

Example Usage

puppy@cerberus:~/okay$ jim signin
Username: duckinator
Password: 
OTP: 
Please choose which scopes you want your API key to have:
index_rubygems? [Y/n] 
push_rubygem? [y/N] y
yank_rubygem? [y/N] 
Saved key with name "jim--cerberus-puppy-2025-10-25T152604" and scopes:
- index_rubygems
- push_rubygem
puppy@cerberus:~/okay$ jim build

Name:    okay
Version: 12.0.4

Output:  /home/puppy/okay/build/okay-12.0.4.gem
puppy@cerberus:~/okay$ gem list | grep okay
puppy@cerberus:~/okay$ gem install build/okay-12.0.4.gem 
Successfully installed okay-12.0.4
1 gem installed
puppy@cerberus:~/okay$

Packed Gems

Packing a gem creates a single Ruby file that contains the entirety of a gem.

Your gem needs to:

• be pure Ruby
• have a single gemspec in the directory you run jim from
• have a single executable specified in your gemspec

When you run jim pack, creates a pure-Ruby unpacker, and appends a JSON object to the end of it.

~/jim$ ruby -Ilib exe/jim pack
build/pack/jim.rb
~/jim$ mv build/pack/jim.rb ~/jim.rb
~/jim$ chmod +x ~/jim.rb
~/jim$ cd ~
~$ ./jim.rb
Usage: jim [COMMAND] [OPTIONS] [ARGS...]

Commands
  jim signin
  jim signout
  jim build
  jim clean
  jim gemspec
  jim help
  jim pack
~$

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, (TODO).

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/duckinator/jim.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.