Gemstash

What is Gemstash?

Gemstash is both a cache for remote servers such as
https://rubygems.org, and a private gem source.

If you are using bundler across many machines
that have access to a server within your control, you might want to use
Gemstash.

If you produce gems that you don’t want everyone in the world to have
access to, you might want to use Gemstash.

If you frequently bundle the same set of gems across multiple projects,
you might want to use Gemstash.

Are you only using gems from https://rubygems.org, and don’t bundle the
same gems frequently? Well, maybe you don’t need Gemstash… yet.

Gemstash
is maintained by Ruby Central, a non-profit
committed to supporting the critical Ruby infrastructure you rely on.
Contribute today as an individual, or even better, as a
company, and ensure that
Bundler, RubyGems, Gemstash, and other shared tooling is around for
years to come.

Quickstart Guide

Setup

Gemstash is designed to be quick and painless to get set up. By the end
of this Quickstart Guide, you will be able to bundle stashed gems from
public sources against a Gemstash server running on your machine.

Install Gemstash to get started:

$ gem install gemstash

After it is installed, starting Gemstash requires no additional steps.
Simply start the Gemstash server with the gemstash command:

$ gemstash start

You may have noticed that the command finished quickly. This is because
Gemstash will run the server in the background by default. The server
runs on port 9292.

Bundling

With the server running, you can bundle against it. Tell Bundler that
you want to use Gemstash to find gems from RubyGems.org:

$ bundle config mirror.https://rubygems.org http://localhost:9292

Now you can create a Gemfile and install gems through Gemstash:

# ./Gemfile
source "https://rubygems.org"
gem "rubywarrior"

The gems you include should be gems you don’t yet have installed,
otherwise Gemstash will have nothing to stash. Now bundle:

$ bundle install --path .bundle

Your Gemstash server has fetched the gems from https://rubygems.org and
cached them for you! To prove this, you can disable your Internet
connection and try again. Gem files (*.gem) are cached indefinitely.
Gem dependencies metadata are cached for 30 minutes, so if you bundle
again before that, you can successfully bundle without an Internet
connection:

$ # Disable your Internet first!
$ rm -rf Gemfile.lock .bundle
$ bundle

Falling back to rubygems.org

If you want to make sure that your bundling from https://rubygems.org
still works as expected when the Gemstash server is not running, you can
easily configure Bundler to fallback to https://rubygems.org.

$ bundle config mirror.https://rubygems.org.fallback_timeout true

You can also configure this fallback as a number of seconds in case the
Gemstash server is simply unresponsive. This example uses a 3 second
timeout:

$ bundle config mirror.https://rubygems.org.fallback_timeout 3

Stopping the Server

Once you’ve finish using your Gemstash server, you can stop it just as
easily as you started it:

$ gemstash stop

You’ll also want to tell Bundler that it can go back to getting gems
from RubyGems.org directly, instead of going through Gemstash:

$ bundle config --delete mirror.https://rubygems.org

Under the Hood

You might wonder where the gems are stored. After running the commands
above, you will find a new directory at ~/.gemstash. This directory
holds all the cached and private gems. It also has a server log, the
database, and configuration for Gemstash. If you prefer, you can point
to a different directory.

Gemstash uses SQLite to store details about
private gems. The database will be located in ~/.gemstash, however you
won’t see the database appear until you start using private gems. If you
prefer, you can use a different
database.

Gemstash temporarily caches things like gem dependencies in memory.
Anything cached in memory will last for 30 minutes before being
retrieved again. You can use
memcached instead of caching in
memory. Gem files are always cached permanently, so bundling with a
Gemfile.lock with all gems cached will never call out to
https://rubygems.org.

The server you ran is provided via Puma and
Rack, however they are not customizable
at this point.

Deep Dive

Deep dive into more subjects:

• Private gems
• Multiple gem sources
• Using Gemstash as a mirror
• Customizing the server (database, storage, caching, and
  more)
• Deploying Gemstash
• Debugging Gemstash

Reference

An anatomy of various configuration and commands:

• Configuration
• Authorize
• Start
• Stop
• Status
• Setup
• Version

To see what has changed in recent versions of Gemstash, see the
CHANGELOG.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies.
Then, run rake to run RuboCop and the tests. While developing, you can
run bin/gemstash to run Gemstash. You can also run bin/console for
an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at
https://github.com/rubygems/gemstash. This project is intended to be a
safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected
to adhere to the Contributor
Covenant
code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT
License.