Use a gem I created, that needs to remain private?

Hey Chris,

First, thanks for all the great videos and for taking the time to answer all these questions!

I want to make a gem for a front-end, Bootstrap spin-off, framework. I've watched your creating a gem video, so my question isn't so much about creating the gem but how to use it afterwords.

I've purchased a copy of the framework and have the proper licensing to use it in my application. So, my question is how do I use it? I don't want to release it to ruby gems or github, as it would be made public (if it were up to me I couldn't care less about releasing something I purchased to the public, but I want to honor their licensing agreements), but I'm not sure how else to get it into my app any other way. Can I use it directly from my machine, like you did in your video, in production?

Thanks for your help, Looking forward to hearing your advice!

That's a really great question. So it would obviously be fantastic if they created private gems that were only accessible to purchasing customers. That would be the easiest solution. Since it seems like you don't have that, you can do a couple things:

1. You can just drop the theme files into the vendor/assets folder and use them in your app just like if you were to do this with Bootstrap without a gem.

2. You could create a gem like I did in that video and host it in a private Git repo and reference the git repo in your Gemfile.

Personally I'd say #1 is probably the easiest if they're not providing a gem because you can easily update things. The benefit of having a gem is that you can use it in multiple applications and keep them all in sync a lot easier that way. Really up to you whichever fits you best.

Awesome!

I was leaning towards option one as well.

Thanks Chris!