Rake::Manifest

Rake tasks to generate and check a manifest file

Add this gem to your gem's development dependencies by adding this line to your gem's Gemfile:

gem 'rake-manifest'

Then execute:

$ bundle install

After installation, setting up rake-manifest for your project requires a couple of steps, that need to be done in order.

First, set up the rake tasks by adding something like the following to your Rakefile:

require "rake/manifest"

# Set up manifest tasks
Rake::Manifest::Task.new do |t|
  # Set patterns for inclusion of files in the manifest. Default is ["**/*"]
  t.patterns = ["{docs,examples,lib}/**/*", "LICENSE.txt", "*.md"]
  # Set the name of the manifest file. Default is "Manifest.txt"
  t.manifest_file = "MyManifest.txt"
end

This will create the tasks manifest:generate and manifest:check.

Next, run manifest:generate to create your manifest file, carefully verify that it contains only the files you want, and check it into source control.

Only after you've done that, update your gemspec to fetch its list of files from the manifest file:

  spec.files = File.read("Manifest.txt").split

You can now use the manifest:check task to verify that all relevant files in your repo are also in the manifest. This task will fail if the check fails.

If you have a task for building your gem, you can make it depend on manifest:check. This will avoid building the gem with incorrect contents. For example, if you're using the Bundler gem tasks, add this to your Rakefile:

task build: "manifest:check"

I recommend including files needed runtime, and documentation such as README.md, but leaving out developer infrastructure such as tests or the Rakefile. You don't need to include the gemspec or Gemfile, since building the gem will automatically create and include its own gemspec.

After checking out the repo, run bundle to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.