GemFresh

The purpose of GemFresh is to expose useful information about how outdated your application gems are.

Setup

Create a file called GemFresh.rb in the root directory of your application. Fill it out like this:

# Any gems that you put in the Gemfile should also be listed here.
# The rake metrics:outdated_gems task calculates which gems are
# outdated and then combines that information with the information
# listed here about a particular gem's reach in the application code.
#
GemFresh::Config.configure do |gems|

  # Updating these gems could require you to make large, system-wide changes
  # to the application code.
  gems.with_system_wide_impact %w(
    resque
    rspec
    ...
  )

  # Updating these gems could require you to make some changes to small
  # sections of the application.
  gems.with_local_impact %w(
    fog
    tabulous
    ...
  )

  # When updating these gems, you barely have to touch any code at all.
  gems.with_minimal_impact %w(
    airbrake
    bullet
    ...
  )

  # We ignore these since we are in complete control of their update cycles.
  gems.that_are_private %w(
    dmc_server_admin
    job_state
    ...
  )

end

Then create a rake task like this:

namespace :metrics do
  desc "display outdated gem version metrics"
  task :outdated_gems do
    GemFresh::Reporter.new.report
  end
end

Usage

See information on your outdated gems by running the rake task:

rake metrics:outdated_gems

This combines information from bundle outdated with the information in GemFresh.rb to give a weighted view as to how outdated your third-party Ruby code is and how much it matters.

Whenever you add a gem to your Gemfile, add it to GemFresh.rb so that the rake task knows how important the gem is.

Gems are assigned points. The more central a gem is, and the more outdated it is, the higher the points. You can think of the points as a "bounty" on the gem, telling you how badly it needs to be updated.