I’ve written a few gems for work that I can’t host on RubyGems. It turned out to be easier to host these than I thought.

Here are the steps I took to make gems.mysite.com host gems that can be installed with gem install [gem] --source http://gems.mysite.com/

Setup (Remote)

mkdir -p /home/gems

Setup (Local)

git clone git://github.com/itspriddle/private-gem-host.git gems.mysite.com
cd gems.mysite.com
curl -O http://gist.github.com/raw/587310/3564b29f31a22a8a0544c1f81565d398cb926b2f/post-update > .git/hooks/post-update
chmod +x .git/hooks/post-update
git remote add production user@mysite.com:/home/gems/.git
scp -r .git user@mysite.com:/home/gems/

Setup (Remote, Again)

cd /home/gems/
git config receive.denyCurrentBranch ignore

Apache vhost Configuration

# /etc/apache2/site-enabled/gems.mysite.com
<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName gems.mysite.com

  DocumentRoot /home/gems/public/

  <Directory /home/gems/public>
    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order Deny,Allow
    Deny from all
    # Only these IPs can reach this site
    Allow from 123.1.1.
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Add some gems (Local)

cp ~/gems/my-secret-library-1.0.0.gem public/gems
git add public/gems/my-secret-library-1.0.0.gem
git commit -m "Added My Secret Library 1.0.0"
git push production master

Install gems

gem install my-secret-library --source http://gems.mysite.com/

How does it work?

The script in bin/update_gems is called by the post-receive hook you setup. Each time you push to production, this script will run and then update the meta files needed (check /home/gems/public/YAML on your remote box for an example). You should see the output when you push. Note the Allow directive in the Apache configuration: you need to add IPs that can access your gem host.