My Gems Setup: .gemrc, .bash_profile, .irbrc

Gems are ruby libraries which are packaged in such a way that they can be often be distributed and installed with little effort. The notes I've jotted down here are most likely specific to using Ruby gems on a debian system.

.gemrc

To customize where gems can be downloaded from an how they are installed, I use the following ~/.gemrc file (the dot at the front tells my computer it should be hidden from normal views, and the tilda only means its in my home directory):

---
:benchmark: false
gem: --no-rdoc --no-ri
:update_sources: true
:verbose: true
:backtrace: false
:sources:
- http://gems.rubyforge.org/
- http://gems.github.com
:bulk_threshold: 1000

.bash_profile

I add this:

PATH=/sbin:/var/lib/gems/1.9.1/bin:"${PATH}"

Favorite Gems

Gems I regularly install:

sudo gem install rack rake rspec rcov unicorn ruby-xslt dm-core dm-more sinatra rack-xslview haml json pony sinatra-xslview tilt vlad jeweler

#### IRB My ~/.irbrc:

require 'irb/ext/save-history'
IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 100
IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb-save-history"