Creating your own RubyGem mirror

In case you want to create your own RubyGem mirror here’s how I did mine.

From now on, let’s pretend we will store the mirrored gems in : /data/rubygems.mirror

First you need to create a config file (YAML format) specifying the source and destination for your mirror (put it in /data/gemmirror.config for example) :

---
- from: http://gems.rubyforge.org
  to: /data/rubygems.mirror

- from is the master mirror you will pull from
- to is the directory where your mirror files will be stored

Then all you have to do is to add this commands as a cron task :

/usr/bin/gem mirror --config-file=/data/gemmirror.config && /usr/bin/gem generate_index -d /data/rubygems.mirror

/usr/bin/gem mirror —config-file=/data/rubygemmirror : will mirror the gems using informations in /data/rubygemmirror file
/usr/bin/gem generate_index -d /data/rubygems.mirror : will generate an optimized index to reduce the datas transfered on index update

Here’s what you asked for Nick !

4 comments »

1. 

   By Steve 9 days later:

   
   

   Hi there, no matter what I do I get an error as follows:

   c:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/config_file.rb:98:in `initialize’: undefined method `key?’ for [{"from"=>"http://gems.rubyforge.org", “to”=>"/temp/gems"}]:Array (NoMethodError)

   It looks like my config file is begin parsed correctly. It looks like this:

   ---
   - from: http://gems.rubyforge.org
     to: /temp/gems
   

   Any ideas? I’m at my wits end!

2. 

   By Jonathan Tron 22 days later:

   
   

   Try rewriting the config file as :

   ---
   from: http://gems.rubyforge.org
   to: /temp/gems
   

   thus not enclosing the hash ({:from => …, :to => …}) in an array.

3. 

   By Nick 5 months later:

   
   

   Thanks.

   I suppose then I set up a web server to provide that directory, and use that address as the source?

   Also, how much space will it take?

   Thanks again.

4. 

   By Jonathan Tron 5 months later:

   
   

   Currently my mirror uses 3.6GB.