rcli_app, A Ruby Gem for Beginners
This blog post is for any beginner Rubyists who are learning on their own or attending a bootcamp that teaches Ruby.
This blog post is for any beginner Rubyists who are learning on their own or attending a bootcamp that teaches Ruby.
When I was attending Flatiron School, my cohort mates and I struggled with how to get our command-line applications started during Mod 1. This was our first project week and we were in this sink-or-swim environment and at the time, a CLI application was the hardest thing we had to get through.
Although I failed my first attempt at Mod 1, it helped me grow and learn how to learn again. This second time going through Mod 1 was a real blessing in disguise because it built up my confidence in my Ruby skills and set me up for success for the following four modules. However, this time around, I was ready for Mod 1 Project Week. This time I could use my confidence and understanding to help my cohort mates but I wanted my impact to help others reach beyond my cohort and even beyond Flatiron. So I created my first RubyGem.
There is a lot of reliable documentation out there to anyone who would like to create their own RubyGem but it was a learning curve. It was something that, as a beginner Rubyist, I was not comfortable with. At that time, I could not even fathom using Ruby on Rails or build any of the projects that I worked during my time in the program.
Enter rcli_app
As this article has been leading up to it, my gem focuses on helping beginner Rubyists get started with creating their own command-line applications. You can check out additional documentation here and the official RubyGem page is here.
There are only three steps that you need to follow (also shown in the video above):
- Install the gem:
gem install rcli_app - Run the following command, it will unpack the folder structure for the command-line application:
gem unpack rcli_app - Finally, make sure to review and then install the gem in the Gemfile with
bundle install
If you have any feedback and/or would like to ask me questions feel free to reach out!