# RubyGems is born at RubyConf

> The way Rubyists install libraries began as an all-night coding dare at RubyConf 2003.

- March 14, 2004: RubyGems first public release (Pi Day)

**RubyGems**, the tool every Rubyist uses to install and manage libraries, got its start in a burst of overnight coding at **RubyConf 2003** in Austin, Texas.

First, the plain-English version. A **package manager** is the thing that fetches and installs reusable bundles of other people's code so you do not have to copy files around by hand. In Ruby, those bundles are called **gems**, and once RubyGems exists you install one by typing `gem install` followed by its name. Before RubyGems, there was no standard way to do this in Ruby, and sharing Ruby code was a lot more painful than it needed to be. RubyGems was not the first package manager anywhere: other languages had their own, most famously Perl's CPAN, online since 1995. What RubyGems did was give *Ruby* its first standard one, and it stuck.

The origin story is a small piece of Ruby folklore. At RubyConf 2003, David A. Black pressed Ruby's creator, [Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/matz.md), about the language's missing package manager, and Matz gave a challenge of an answer: "if you build it, it will be included in ruby core." So a group did exactly that. Richard Kilmer, Chad Fowler, David Black, Paul Brannan, and [Jim Weirich](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/jim-weirich.md) spent the night coding, and had a working prototype to demo at the conference before it ended.

Development continued after everyone went home, and the first public release landed on **March 14, 2004**, which Rubyists happily note is **Pi Day** (3.14). RubyGems became so essential that it was eventually bundled into Ruby itself, and it remains the foundation that later tools like [Bundler](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/bundler.md), which pins the exact set of gems a project needs, are built on top of.

*Related:* [Bundler](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/bundler.md) · [Jim Weirich](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/jim-weirich.md) · [Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/matz.md)

## Sources
- RubyGems (Wikipedia), what it is, `gem install`, the creators, RubyConf 2003 origin, March 14 2004 / Pi Day release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RubyGems
- Fowler on RubyGems (onrails.org, 2006), the RubyConf 2003 session, Matz's "if you build it" challenge, the overnight coding and demo: https://onrails.org/2006/07/20/fowler-on-rubygems.html
- CPAN (Wikipedia; Perl's package archive, online since 1995, predating RubyGems): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPAN

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Source: https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/rubygems-at-rubyconf/
License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)