Adding CLI to Your Gem using Thor

Our example gem is called lorem. Replace lorem with your gem directory name accordingly.

1. Go into your Gem directory

cd lorem

2. Create the cli.rb in lib/lorem

touch lib/lorem/cli.rb

3. In the cli.rb file, create a class that inherits from Thor

require "thor"

class CLI < Thor
  desc "ipsum", "Lorem text generator"
  def ipsum
    puts "Lorem Ipsum blah blah blah"
  end
end

Read more about this on the Thor website http://whatisthor.com/

4. Create bin folder

mkdir bin

5. Create executable file naming it your gem command

touch bin/lorem

6. Add this into your bin/lorem file

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'lorem/cli'

CLI.start

7. In lorem.gemspec, add this before end

spec.add_runtime_dependency "thor"

How to Run Your Unpublished Gem

There are 3 possible ways to run it.

• ruby -I lib bin/gem_command_name

• bundle exec bin/gem_command_name

  If you get a bundler: not executable: bin/gem_command_name error, run chmod +x bin/gem_command_name

• bundle exec gem_command_name

  We currently haven't figured out why the last command doesn't work.