Looking Inside a Ruby Gem

Ifyou have used Ruby for any length of time you have probably, knowingly or not, used a gem. It could’ve been already installed on your system as part of your Ruby release. You may also have downloaded it with the RubyGems package manager. Irrespective of how you got hold of a gem, you required it as a dependency in your file and used it. But, have you ever wondered what a gem is? What’s inside a Ruby gem? Having written a Ruby gem manifest file in the Writing a Ruby Gem Specification article, it’s only natural to use it to learn how a Ruby package is built.