annotate-gem is command line tool that will add useful comments to your Gemfile. For each gem, annotate-gem will create a comment with the gem's description and the gem's website. For example, a Gemfile containing the following
gem "rails"
gem "nokogiri"
gem "brakeman"will be converted into something that is more descriptive and is self-documenting:
# Full-stack web application framework. (http://www.rubyonrails.org)
gem "rails"
# Nokogiri (鋸) is an HTML, XML, SAX, and Reader parser
gem "nokogiri"
# Security vulnerability scanner for Ruby on Rails. (http://brakemanscanner.org)
gem "brakeman"The motivation for annotate-gem is that developers often open a Gemfile and not know what many of the listed gems are actually for. It's hard to track down which gem is providing which functionality. This is a common problem since many gem names do not reflect the actual feature.
If you do not want to install the gem, you can also visit https://annotate-gem.herokuapp.com/ which is a web interface for annotate-gem.
$ gem install annotate_gem
Running annotate-gem itself will add comments to the current directory's Gemfile.
$ cat Gemfile
source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem "pry"
$ annotate-gem
$ cat Gemfile
source 'https://rubygems.org'
# An IRB alternative and runtime developer console (http://pryrepl.org)
gem "pry"
annotate-gem has several options:
$ annotate_gem --help
Add comments to your Gemfile with each dependency's description.
Usage: annotate_gem [options]
annotate_gem [gem name]
--website-only Only output the website
--description-only Only output the description
--new-comments-only Only add a comment to gemfile if there isn't a comment already (for non-inline comments)
--inline Inline the comment
-h, --help Show this message
-v, --version Show version
annotate-gem also works with specifying a single gem name:
$ annotate-gem aasm
State machine mixin for Ruby objects (https://github.com/aasm/aasm)
- Fork it ( https://github.com/ivantsepp/annotate_gem/fork )
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some feature') - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature) - Create a new Pull Request