I have a gem installed but require 'gemname' does not work. Why?

Question

The question I\'m really asking is why require does not take the name of the gem. Also, In the case that it doesn\'t, what\'s the easiest way to find the secret incantation

Answer 1

There is no standard for what the file you need to include is. However there are some commonly followed conventions that you can can follow try and make use of:

• Often the file is called the same name as the gem. So require mygem will work.
• Often the file is the only .rb file in the lib subdirectory of the gem, So if you can get the name of the gem (maybe you are itterating through vendor/gems in a pre 2.1 rails project), then you can inspect #{gemname}/lib for .rb files, and if there is only one, its a pretty good bet that is the one to require

If all of that works, then all you can do is look into the gem's directory (which you can find by running gem environment | grep INSTALLATION | awk '{print $4}' and looking in the lib directory, You will probably need to read the files and hope there is a comment explaining what to do