Sure, the Standard Library is quite large but…
no, it does not have everything you need. Luckily, it’s full of gems out there! Rubygems is Ruby’s
packaging system, and the best way to distribute your own libraries and applications.
The Rubygems packaging system is now included in most Ruby implementation and distributions. Installing a gem and all
its dependencies is as easy as issuing gem install <name of the gem>. So for example if you want
to install the rails gem, you can just run
gem install rails
…and it will be automatically downloaded and installed on your system, along with the other gems it depends on.
There are over 1300 different gems publicly (and freely!) available. Luckily, the official gem host site,
RubyGems.org makes it very easy to find what you're looking for: just search
for a particular gem or a functionality you're looking for, and browse through the results. You can also register
and
push your own gems for other people to use.
What happened to RubyForge?
If you started to learn Ruby a few years ago, the RubyForge was
the place to find user-created ruby code and gems. The site is still there, but nowadays Rubyists
prefer using GitHub as host for their source code repositories and
RubyGems.org as the home for their gems.
