Apprise

Manfred Stienstra, 01 Nov 2009, 20:47 in ruby on rails and releases, last updated 02 Nov 2009, 10:10 (edit).

Last friday Eloy and I participated in the Ruby en Rails Rails Rumble 2009, we had 8 hours to write an application which helped developers find out more information about the dependencies in their Rails application.

Our submission is called Apprise. Apprise is a tool to check gem dependencies and external repositories for newer versions of the currently installed ones in your Rails application.

To be more specific, it looks for three sources of dependencies. Git and Subversion externals in vendor/plugins and bundled Gems in the Gemfile. Checking for Gem dependencies is delegated to Bundler. If you don’t use Bundler to manage Gem dependencies you will still see outdated externals and submodules.

Outdated dependencies are listed and you can decide to update the externals, submodules or gems.

$ apprise                 
Outdated dependencies
 * forestwatcher (Subversion external)
 * risosu-san (Git submodule)
 * miso (Gem)

If you want to try it out you can easily install the gem and run the command in the root of your Rails application.

$ gem install apprise --source http://gemcutter.org

Unfortunately we did not win, but our patch for Bundler to list outdated gems was pulled by Yehuda Katz right after the competition.

Comments

  1. Vesa Vänskä about 13 hours later: (delete | show email)

    The installation command is incorrect. It should be:

    $ gem install apprise --source http://gemcutter.org

    Thanks for the gem. It's a handy little tool.

  2. Manfred Stienstra about 13 hours later: (delete)

    Thank Vesa, I changed it.

  3. Tim 30 days later: (delete | show email)

    Nice lil gem. Thanks. Found it pretty helpful in all its three types of dependencies.

Add your comment

In order to fight spam on this blog, posting comments from a browser without javascript is currently not supported.