For those of you who follow this sort of thing, Github shut down their gem building. Thankfully, a newer and easier gem hoster, Gemcutter, appeared on the scene not long before that happened. The idea behind it, for those who haven’t heard of it, is that you manage your own gem building. Gemcutter doesn’t wait for your Gem spec to change before it makes a new gem. You simply build it locally, and push it to Gemcutter, using a handy gem they provide that extends Rubygems ‘gem’ console command.

But Github was building gems for some time, and due to it’s continuing popularity, many well known Ruby on Rails developers and companies switched permanently to Github for their gem building/hosting at the time, so it’s likely that quite a few gems you’ve got installed are from Github.

To help transition over from Github to Gemcutter, Maxim Chernyak wrote a great utility called off_github, which looks at your list of gems, and tells you which ones you’re installed from Github, and whether they can be reinstalled from Gemcutter. It saves a lot of time and effort  than having to do it manually. So here’s how to get started….

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