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I´m finishing a Ruby Gem that depends on Chromium (jxBrowser). Chromium is quite large and has versions for linux, mac and windows. Releasing this gem to RubyGem is not possible, as the gem size is larger than supported by RubyGem. So, are there any recommendations on where/how to release this? I´d love to keep it in RubyGem as my other gens were released there. Should I release an installer in RubyGem and put the files in GitHub? What´s the best way?

Thanks for any hints and suggestions....

Rodrigo Botafogo
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    Why don't you make Chromium as a dependency instead of shipping the gem with it? – lcguida Dec 20 '16 at 14:16
  • Just because Chromium is a dependency does not mean you need to include it in your gem. Many gems have binary dependencies that they do not ship with – engineersmnky Dec 20 '16 at 14:17
  • Maybe a bit hidden in the question, but my gem depends on jxBrowser which is an embedded java browser that is based on Chromium. jxBrowser is free for non-commercial use, but requires a license. So, I don´t think there is a way to ask my users to downoload jxBrowser from TeamDev directly (the developers), as they would not have the license. – Rodrigo Botafogo Dec 20 '16 at 21:24

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You can ask your users to install the gem from git (bundler: http://bundler.io/git.html, Install Gem from Github Branch?).

This will result in a line like

gem 'hard_drive_expander', github: 'rodrigo/hard_drive_expander'

in a Gemfile (or a bit a lengthier process for gem install - do you intend 'library' kind of usage or standalone installations). Note that depending on your scenario you could have an installer gem that depends on the "github-hosted" gem, or downloads and builds/installs it (both seem like dirty solutions to me though, its not what I expect or commonly see).

Although github does place quotas on your repositories, you will probably not hit them (https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-my-disk-quota/).

Another option is to host it yourself (http://guides.rubygems.org/run-your-own-gem-server/).

Sorry for the "linky" answer.

However, @icguida and @engineersmnky s comments to your question are very worth considering: Do you really need to include chromium?

Update

There is a gem that will hook into gem to allow for usage like this: gem specific_install https://github.com/githubsvnclone/rdoc.git. The gem is called specific_install: https://github.com/rdp/specific_install .

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Felix
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  • You say: "bit a lengthier process for gem install". How can this be done from gem install? It is a library and not a standalone application. – Rodrigo Botafogo Dec 21 '16 at 15:15
  • Users of the library might not have bundler in their system, so I just want them to do a normal 'gem install....' and this would also grab the correct jxBrowser for their system (windows, linux, mac). – Rodrigo Botafogo Dec 21 '16 at 15:22
  • @RodrigoBotafogo: Like in answers in the second link provided, it might requiring checking out the gems source, building and installing it. – Felix Dec 22 '16 at 17:35