Hi there, I’m the creator of a new RubyGem hosting site, Gemcutter. I also happen to be one of the newest hires at Heroku, but I promise, I decided the project was going to be hosted on Heroku long before starting to work here. Heroku’s been kind enough to pitch in getting the site deployed and ready for the whole Ruby community to enjoy.
There’s nothing more fitting than for the next generation of RubyGem hosts to be supported by a truly next generation web application hosting platform. The project has the following goals:
- Provide a better API for dealing with gems
- Create more transparent and accessible project pages
- Enable the community to improve and enhance the site
Recently, the site’s redesign was launched, and we will soon be moving over to http://rubygems.org. Over 23,000 gems are hosted through Amazon S3, and new ones are showing up every day.
Contributors have recently started to add some really neat features such as prerelease gem support and subscribing to RSS feeds for updates about your gems. Some features slated for the near future are full text searching of READMEs for gems, Ruby 1.9 and JRuby compatibility, and allowing gem authors to delete their own gems if they need to.
Gemcutter will be used by default for gem installs when using the Heroku gem manifest starting next week. This should result in faster deploys since the installs will be taking place over the EC2/S3 LAN.
A deeper explanation of how Heroku’s architecture and add-ons has affected Gemcutter’s internal design will be coming soon. The Heroku platform has really helped address some serious issues regarding scalability that wouldn’t have been brought up if we were hosted somewhere else. For now, you can check out how easy it to store files in S3, run background jobs, and use HTTP caching to really speed up your application. And if you haven’t yet, check out gemcutter.org!