We are using Ruby on some projects and really wanted to give Apache Buildr a try. The problem with buildr is that it plugs ifself into the maven dependency management. Downgrading dependencies back to maven was not an option, so we needed a way to use Ivy with Buildr.

ivy4r to the rescue

To integrate ivy into buildr ivy4r was created. Ivy4r is a wrapper around Ivy using antwrap and provides a pure ruby interface to ivy. The interface provides all Ant tasks that can be useful. On top of this two extensions are provided one for buildr one for rake. By requiring the appropriate extension ivy can be integrated seamless into the build process using the standard way buildr extensions are configured.

For more information check out the ivy4r documentation on github or rubyforge:

• http://github.com/klaas1979/ivy4r/tree/master
• http://hamburgrb.rubyforge.org/ivy4r/

First I tried to use only hoe but did not get a gemspec file out of it. So I added jeweler to get a gemspec via the rake target gemspec but did not want to configure hoe and jeweler separate. So I used the hoe generated gemspec object to initialize jeweler and thought that it was a good solution.

But then I stumbled upon the best solution, hoe supports the generation of gemspecs only the target name is a bit akward. Just call rake with the command rake debug_gem as recommended on github.

The previous solution combining hoe and jeweler

The rake file:

require 'rubygems'
require 'hoe'
require 'yourgem'

hoe = Hoe.spec 'yourgem' do |p|
  # self.rubyforge_name = 'yourgemx' # if different than 'yourgem'
  p.developer('Yourname', 'yourmail@example.com')
  p.remote_rdoc_dir = '' # Release to root only one project
  p.extra_deps << yourdeps
  File.open(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'VERSION'), 'w') do |file|
    file.puts Yourgem::VERSION
  end
end

begin
  require 'jeweler'
  Jeweler::Tasks.new(hoe.spec)
rescue LoadError
  puts "Jeweler not available. Install it with: sudo gem install technicalpickles-jeweler -s http://gems.github.com"
end