RubyGems (ruby)

A RubyGems Feed in ProGet acts as a private RubyGems source. RubyGems can be used directly from the Gem client and can also be viewed directly on the ProGet website.

Prerequisites

Although ProGet was tested with older versions, we recommend using rubygems 3.0.0 or higher. You can use gem -v to see which version of rubygems you have installed.

RubyGems Client Configuration

Before installing packages from ProGet, you should add ProGet to your gem installation by using the gem sources command.

gem sources --add http://«proget-server»/rubygems/«feed-name»

If you want to install packages only from ProGet, you'll want to remove other sources.

$ gem sources
*** CURRENT SOURCES ***

https://rubygems.org
http://«proget-server»/rubygems/«feed-name»

$ gem sources --remove https://rubygems.org/
https://rubygems.org/ removed from sources

Note that these sources are stored in your ~/.gemrc file.

Testing Client Configuration

You can use the gem search command to make sure that your client is properly connected to ProGet.

$ gem search «search-string»

This will search all sources configured in your ~/.gemrc file to be searched. Use the --source argument to specify your ProGet server if you have multiple sources configured.

Installing Ruby Gems

You can use RubyGems from ProGet just like you would use gems from rubygems.org. These are generally installed using the gem install command:

$ gem install «package-name» --version «package-version»

Creating and Pushing Ruby Gems

Creating and pushing Ruby Gems to a ProGet feed are performed using the gem build and gem push commands.

You can learn about how to create and publish a Ruby Gem to ProGet by reading our guide on HOWTO: Create and Push RubyGems to a Private Source in ProGet.

Authentication

The first time gem needs to authenticate to ProGet (whether for installing or publishing packages), it will prompt for credentials and then store the results in your ~/.gem/credentials file. You can enter the same username/ password you used to authenticate to ProGet, or a username of api and a valid API Key.

You can read more about creating API keys in ProGet on our API Key page. When creating an API Key you will need to fill in the fields by selecting "Feeds ("Use Certain Feeds)" as the "Feed Type" and selecting your RubyGems feed, and make sure the necessary permission boxes are checked.

Authenticating to a Ruby Gems Feed

To authenticate to a Ruby Gems feed from a local Ruby environment requires the feed URL and API key. Add the feed as a source by entering:

$ gem sources --add http://api:«api-key»@«feed-url

For example, authenticating to http://proget.corp.local/rubygems/public-gems/ using the API key abc12345 you would enter:

$ gem sources --add http://api:abc12345@proget.corp.local/rubygems/public-gems/

Confirm that it was set by entering:

$ gem sources list 

Troubleshooting: Bundler & Dependencies

When using a ProGet feed that's connected to rubygems.org, you may notice that running bundle update on a gem like fastlane takes a preposterous amount of time and resources. This is because fastlane has hundreds of dependencies, and bundler needs to download and inspect every single version of every single gem to find if it's a suitable match.

This is ultimately a result of the dependency API being disabled on RubyGems.org and disabled on ProGet by default.

The dependency API was the primary way that Bundler fetched dependency info for Gemfile resolution. However, this caused a significant load on the RubyGems.org servers, so a new API was developed and Bundler started using that if available.

Unfortunately, the new API (called the Compact Index API) was only designed with RubyGems.org in mind, and it doesn't work very well with private repositories like ProGet.

Support for the Compact Index API

The Compact Index API has three endpoints, two of which are supported by ProGet.

<table>
    <tr><td><code>/names</code></td><td> alphabetically-sorted list of gem names</td><td>✅ Supported</td></tr>
    <tr><td><code>/info/gem_name</code></td><td>precedence-sorted list of versions for a gem</td><td>✅ Supported</td></tr>
    <tr><td><code>/versions</code></td><td>tail-appended list of gems published to the library</td><td>🟡 Partially Supported</td></tr>
</table>

The reason that /versions is not fully supported is because it's mostly incompatible with the notion of connectors, private packages, etc. It's basically a massive plaintext file (28mb+ and growing every day) that's kind of like the old "dependencies" endpoint.

Rubygems.org appends new lines to the file (which they store on cloud storage), and these lines may be duplicative of previous data in the file. The Bundler client uses ETags and HTTP Range requests to do "incremental" updates to the file, and then reads it "backwards".

For users, this means that the first time you run bundler, it will download the whole file... and then it only downloads new lines each time. This approach works because RubyGems.org is essentially read-only, and packages cannot be deleted or replaced.

A private repository like ProGet can't really maintain a static text file because we have to aggregate connector data with local packages. Those are both frequently changing/dynamic datasets, and can't be tail-appended static files. And there are also load-balanced servers to consider.

Although ProGet can easily generate this text file on demand, bundler would need to frequently download the whole file. For most use cases, that's slower than downloading (and caching) all of the gems.

Instead, when the Dependencies API is enabled, ProGet will download the /versions file from RubyGems.org, process it, and use that to return Dependencies.