Creating A Rubygems Mirror On Ubuntu 14.10

So I guess it is apparent that I am on a bit of a kick creating mirrors.  This is because they are creating mirrors internally at work and I want to have a better understanding of how things work (and what is needed to puppetize things). 

Before we can get down to the nitty-gritty of creating the mirror, we have to do a bit of prerequisite work first.   To start with, I will tell you that I am working on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 14.10.  That disclosed, ruby comes installed by default.  Please know that I will be only referencing the

The first thing that we need to get installed is the ruby-dev package.  You can install that with the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby-dev

After you install that, make sure that your system is up to date:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Now, we need to get a couple of gems installed:

$ sudo gem install net-http-persistent

Next we need to install a whole slew of things (inluding git):

sudo apt-get install git-core curl zlib1g-dev build-essential libssl-dev libreadline-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev python-software-properties libffi-dev

Now it is time to install rbenv.  This tool will provide you the ability to install different versions of ruby (other than the default).  Its handy, so I am including it here for giggles.   Here are the steps to install rbenv (these should be done as you, not sudo/root):

$ git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
- Add $HOME/.rbenv/bin to your PATH variable
- Add eval "$(rbenv init -)" to your .bashrc file

 Now you need to install the rubygems-mirror gem.  This is what is used to create the mirror:

$ sudo gem install rubygems-mirror

After that finishes, you will need to create the the '.mirrorrc' file:

$ vi ~/.gem/.mirrorrc

 In this file, you are going to specify where to grab the gems from and where to put them on your system:

---
- from: http://rubygems.org
  to: ~/path/to/put/the/files

You will need to make sure that you create the directory you specify in the "to:" portion.
After you save the .mirrorrc file and create the directory, you are ready to start mirroring:

$ gem mirror

This is going to take a while.  I ran it and it took several hours to download (and I have a fiber internet connection with 30Mb down).  So, once you start the download, you might as well go do something (watch a movie, read a book, hack on a Raspberry Pi, whatever you feel like.  Just monitor it once in a while to ensure it keeps going successfully.

Warning:  The download is many gigabytes and you are going to need some space for it.

That's it, you now have a mirror of Rubygems that you can reference in offline situations.  Stay tuned and I will put up a post on how to run a server that points to this mirror so that you can put it to good use.