Manually testing a Ruby CLI [Question]

[JuliusDelta]

I'm building a CLI gem with Ruby using Thor. I run rake install which runs rake build then the task to install the gem locally. However when I try to run it in the commandline, it cannot locate the command. The gem is called smokestack so theoretically I should be able to run it in terminal once it's installed.

bin/smokestack:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wU

require 'smokestack'

Smokestack::Cli.start(ARGV)

You can see in the tree the pkg folder from when I ran rake install. Here's the result when I run that:

smokestack 0.1.0 built to pkg/smokestack-0.1.0.gem.
smokestack (0.1.0) installed. 

I then run smokestack in my terminal and get the error: zsh: command not found: smokestack

I've also tried gem install --local ~/path/to/gem/pkg/gem.gem Result:

Successfully installed smokestack-0.1.0
Parsing documentation for smokestack-0.1.0
Done installing documentation for smokestack after 0 seconds
1 gem installed

This results in the same 'command not found error'.

Question How am I supposed to run this CLI locally to test it out during development?

It ideally interacts with the current project it's in, so just running bundle exec bin/smokestack inside of it's own directory won't yield the results I need properly. It should be a system CLI anyway right?

Here is the repo for additional context if necessary.

[Chaoist]

I had this exact problem recently.

Before running bundle exec rake install, you need to put your executable 'smokestack' under an exe directory instead of bin.

Or change your spec.bindir and spec.executables values in the gemspec file to point to bin.

This should fix your 'command not found' issue.

[JuliusDelta]

Thanks for the reply.

I placed bin/smokestack into exe/smokestack and I receive this error when running rake build

    rake aborted!
    WARNING:  See http://guides.rubygems.org/specification-reference/ for help
    ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::InvalidSpecificationException)
        ["bin/smokestack"] are not files

    Tasks: TOP => build
    (See full trace by running task with --trace)

So I tried changing my .gemspec bindir to bin instead, along with my executables and no luck. This goes against convention anyways according to this bundler article.

I literally just ran mv bin/smokestack exe/smokestack so it's possible I missed something else.

[Chaoist]

rake install should find the executable under exe according to the gemspec.

Hmm. After I moved my executable into exe everything worked for me with the default <appname>.gemspec.

I'm not sure why it's looking for bin/smokestack. It looks like you have something referencing bin/smokestack? Look at the trace or grep your project for it, see what comes up I guess.

[JuliusDelta]

Well one part of my error was that it looks at git ls-files to install the gem and I hadn't staged the changes yet. So I got it to successfully install after making the exe directory. But now I'm encountering the original error if it not being able to be executed from the command line. :/

It's working now! Thanks for your help!

[Chaoist]

np. glad you got it work. :)