King & McGaw Developers

A couple of days ago I wrote about turning your CSS into a ruby gem. Since then my colleague John suggested that I add Bourbon and Neat as dependencies, as the SCSS included in the gem will not work without them.

So, once again I was faced with a new challenge - and once again it turned out to be fairly simple in the end.

I won’t go into details about the different kinds of dependencies you can use in a gem, the rubygems guide does a better job of that than I would, but the process is the same either way.

In your <gem name>.gemspec file, you just need to add the following:

    spec.add_dependency "bourbon", ">= 3.1.4"
    spec.add_dependency "neat", ">= 1.3.0"

Obviously the name and version number of the gems you include here will be whatever you are using on your project.

The next, and final step is to go to lib/<gem name>.rb and require your dependencies at the top of the file, underneath your <gem name>/version require statement:

    require "bourbon"
    require "neat"

And that’s it. Next time you (or someone else) uses your gem, the dependencies will be installed without having to include them separately.