Working with the RubyGems registry

You can configure RubyGems to publish a package to GitHub Packages and to use packages stored on GitHub Packages as dependencies in a Ruby project with Bundler.

Who can use this feature?

GitHub Packages is available with GitHub Free, GitHub Pro, GitHub Free for organizations, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 or higher.


GitHub Packages is not available for private repositories owned by accounts using legacy per-repository plans. Also, accounts using legacy per-repository plans cannot access registries that support granular permissions, because these accounts are billed by repository. Enterprise Managed Users do not have individual storage allocation to publish packages within their account's namespace, but can publish to an organization's namespace. For additional information on Enterprise Managed Users, see About Enterprise Managed Users. For the list of registries that support granular permissions, see About permissions for GitHub Packages. For more information, see GitHub’s plans.

In this article

URL for the RubyGems registry

If you access GitHub at GitHub.com, you will publish packages to https://rubygems.pkg.github.com. Examples in this article use this URL.

If you access GitHub at another domain, such as octocorp.ghe.com, replace "https://rubygems.pkg.github.com" with https://rubygems.SUBDOMAIN.ghe.com, where SUBDOMAIN is your enterprise's unique subdomain.

Prerequisites

  • You must have RubyGems 2.4.1 or higher. To find your RubyGems version:

    gem --version

  • You must have bundler 1.6.4 or higher. To find your Bundler version:

    $ bundle --version
Bundler version 1.13.7

Authenticating to GitHub Packages

Note

GitHub Packages only supports authentication using a personal access token (classic). For more information, see "Managing your personal access tokens."

You need an access token to publish, install, and delete private, internal, and public packages.

You can use a personal access token (classic) to authenticate to GitHub Packages or the GitHub API. When you create a personal access token (classic), you can assign the token different scopes depending on your needs. For more information about packages-related scopes for a personal access token (classic), see "About permissions for GitHub Packages."

To authenticate to a GitHub Packages registry within a GitHub Actions workflow, you can use:

  • GITHUB_TOKEN to publish packages associated with the workflow repository.
  • a personal access token (classic) with at least read:packages scope to install packages associated with other private repositories (which GITHUB_TOKEN can't access).

Authenticating in a GitHub Actions workflow

This registry supports granular permissions. For registries that support granular permissions, if your GitHub Actions workflow is using a personal access token to authenticate to a registry, we highly recommend you update your workflow to use the GITHUB_TOKEN. For guidance on updating your workflows that authenticate to a registry with a personal access token, see "Publishing and installing a package with GitHub Actions."

Note

The ability for GitHub Actions workflows to delete and restore packages using the REST API is currently in public preview and subject to change.

You can use a GITHUB_TOKEN in a GitHub Actions workflow to delete or restore a package using the REST API, if the token has admin permission to the package. Repositories that publish packages using a workflow, and repositories that you have explicitly connected to packages, are automatically granted admin permission to packages in the repository.

For more information about the GITHUB_TOKEN, see "Automatic token authentication." For more information about the best practices when using a registry in actions, see "Security hardening for GitHub Actions."

You can also choose to give access permissions to packages independently for GitHub Codespaces and GitHub Actions. For more information, see "Configuring a package's access control and visibility" and "Configuring a package's access control and visibility."

Authenticating with a personal access token

You must use a personal access token (classic) with the appropriate scopes to publish and install packages in GitHub Packages. For more information, see "Introduction to GitHub Packages."

To publish and install gems, you can configure RubyGems or Bundler to authenticate to GitHub Packages using your personal access token.

To publish new gems, you need to authenticate to GitHub Packages with RubyGems by editing your ~/.gem/credentials file to include your personal access token (classic). Create a new ~/.gem/credentials file if this file doesn't exist.

For example, you would create or edit a ~/.gem/credentials to include the following, replacing TOKEN with your personal access token.

---
:github: Bearer TOKEN

To install gems, you need to authenticate to GitHub Packages by updating your gem sources to include https://USERNAME:TOKEN@rubygems.pkg.github.com/NAMESPACE/. You must replace:

  • USERNAME with your GitHub username.
  • TOKEN with your personal access token (classic).
  • NAMESPACE with the name of the personal account or organization to which the gem is scoped.

If you would like your package to be available globally, you can run the following command to add your registry as a source.

gem sources --add https://USERNAME:TOKEN@rubygems.pkg.github.com/NAMESPACE/

To authenticate with Bundler, configure Bundler to use your personal access token (classic), replacing USERNAME with your GitHub username, TOKEN with your personal access token, and NAMESPACE with the name of the personal account or organization to which the gem is scoped.

bundle config https://rubygems.pkg.github.com/NAMESPACE USERNAME:TOKEN

Publishing a package

When you first publish a package, the default visibility is private. To change the visibility or set access permissions, see "Configuring a package's access control and visibility." For more information on creating your gem, see Make your own gem in the RubyGems documentation.

Note

If you publish a package that is linked to a repository, the package automatically inherits the access permissions of the linked repository, and GitHub Actions workflows in the linked repository automatically get access to the package, unless your organization has disabled automatic inheritance of access permissions. For more information, see "Configuring a package's access control and visibility."

  1. Authenticate to GitHub Packages. For more information, see "Authenticating to GitHub Packages."

  2. Build the package from the gemspec to create the .gem package. Replace GEM_NAME with the name of your gem.

    gem build GEM_NAME.gemspec

  3. Publish a package to GitHub Packages, replacing NAMESPACE with the name of the personal account or organization to which the package will be scoped and GEM_NAME with the name of your gem package.

    Note

    The maximum uncompressed size of a gem's metadata.gz file must be less than 2 MB. Requests to push gems that exceed that limit will fail.

    $ gem push --key github \
--host https://rubygems.pkg.github.com/NAMESPACE \
GEM_NAME-0.0.1.gem

Connecting a package to a repository

The RubyGems registry stores packages within your organization or personal account, and allows you to associate packages with a repository. You can choose whether to inherit permissions from a repository, or set granular permissions independently of a repository.

You can ensure gems will be linked to a repository as soon as they are published by including the URL of the GitHub repository in the github_repo field in gem.metadata. You can link multiple gems to the same repository.

gem.metadata = { "github_repo" => "ssh://github.com/OWNER/REPOSITORY" }

For information on linking a published package with a repository, see Connecting a repository to a package.

Installing a package

You can use gems from GitHub Packages much like you use gems from rubygems.org. You need to authenticate to GitHub Packages by adding your GitHub user or organization as a source in the ~/.gemrc file or by using Bundler and editing your Gemfile.

  1. Authenticate to GitHub Packages. For more information, see "Authenticating to GitHub Packages."

  2. For Bundler, add your GitHub user or organization as a source in your Gemfile to fetch gems from this new source. For example, you can add a new source block to your Gemfile that uses GitHub Packages only for the packages you specify, replacing GEM_NAME with the package you want to install from GitHub Packages and NAMESPACE with the personal account or organization to which the gem you want to install is scoped.

    source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "rails"

source "https://rubygems.pkg.github.com/NAMESPACE" do
  gem "GEM_NAME"
end

  3. For Bundler versions earlier than 1.7.0, you need to add a new global source. For more information on using Bundler, see the bundler.io documentation.

    source "https://rubygems.pkg.github.com/NAMESPACE"
source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "rails"
gem "GEM_NAME"

  4. Install the package:

    gem install GEM_NAME --version "0.1.1"

Further reading