RubyGems is born at RubyConf

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, 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 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, which pins the exact set of gems a project needs, are built on top of.

Related: Bundler · Jim Weirich · Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto