A chat with Nick Quaranto about RubyGems.org internals

RubyGems.org has made it much easier for all of us to contribute Ruby gems

Nick Quaranto (@qrush) revolutionized gem authoring in 2009 by launching a new gem repository called Gemcutter.org. Suddently for the first time any Ruby developer could publish a new gem simply by running “gem push my_awesome_gem.” The speed and simplicity of this new process caused an explosion of Ruby gem development and publishing. Gemcutter.org was later moved to RubyGems.org and became the Ruby community’s default gem repository.

I enjoyed listening to Nick chat with the RubyRogues about RubyGems.org a couple of weeks ago, especially the stories about how Nick got started developing Gemcutter and it’s early history. Then last week I had the opportunity to chat with Nick about how RubyGems.org actually works. I was curious to know more about what happens on the server when I push a new gem file, how it serves gems to everyone so quickly, and how it works with the new Bundler 1.1 dependency API. You can read the highlights of our conversation over on RubySource.com.