list of all/best gems for Ruby?
RubyRubygemsRuby Problem Overview
I've been out of the Ruby world for a while (3 years), but I'm coming back for a project. I am now overwhelmed by all the gems available. Is there a list of gems by popularity/best gems? And where is the current list of all the gems?
Ruby Solutions
Solution 1 - Ruby
I don't know about "best," but if you want to see a list of commonly used gems for various purposes, I've found http://ruby-toolbox.com/">The Ruby Toolbox to be a great resource. The rankings are determined by counting up the number of forks and watchers of various github projects, so I'd view it less as "this is what I should be using," and more as "these are some things I should check out." At the very least, they're all likely to be under active development and fairly up to date, and it's very useful to see groups of gems broken down by category.
To get a list of all gems from a particular source, you can use gem list --remote, as August points out. Rubyforge (which is your default source) and github are definitely the two most-used.
Solution 2 - Ruby
Ruby gems is a package manager for ruby projects. There is no such thing as "best" gems. Perhaps most used, but not "best".
For a list of all the gems on rubygems.org, try gem list --remote. You can also try gem list --remote --source=http://gems.github.com/, since github is a popular gem distribution source as well.
Solution 3 - Ruby
Gemcutter is an alternative source for deploying Ruby gems, and it maintains some stats as to which are the most downloaded gems (which hints at popularity).
Unfortunately it doesn't maintain much more than a top 10 on the stats page, which is flooded with Rails dependencies. However if you search for specific gems you can see the download stats quite clearly to gauge popularity.