how do i use a newly installed gem?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi - I wanted to try out the Blackbook gem:

http://contentfree.rubyforge.org/blackbook/

So I did

gem install blackbook

and I kept getting failures installing, and finally I used the -- ignore-dependencies flag in gem install, and I got it installed. Now I try to do something very simple like

contacts = Blackbook.get :username => 'myname@yahoo.com', :password => 'password'

and I get

NameError: uninitialized constant Blackbook

at both the console and in the debugger. my question is, do I have to do something to use the newly installed gem? I'm new to gems and have only used them for examples and such.

Thanks for any help, Dino

2

Did you require the gem?

3

I didn't originally, but now I did. I added:

require 'blackbook'

and now, I get

no such file to load -- blackbook

I've checked and blackbook.rb is installed here:

C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\blackbook-1.0.4\lib

i don't have any idea how ruby looks for gems or where. this error tells me it can't find blackbook.rb. Any ideas?

Thanks, Dino

4

Is this is Rails 2.1?

If so did you look at the comments pertaining to gems in config/environment.rb?

Example: config.gem "hpricot", :version => '0.6', :source => "http://code.whytheluckystiff.net"

dino d. wrote:

5

If so did you look at the comments pertaining to gems in config/environment.rb?

Or optionally you may consider "vendoring" the gem.

See: Vendor Everything — err.the_blog

Robert Walker wrote:

6

no, i'm running rails 2.0.2

thanks for your help so far.

7

SOLVED!

The problem was that since the installer failed, I had to install without dependencies. Apparently, I forgot to manually install fastercsv, but instead of throwing a message like 'no fastercsv,' it said 'no such file to load.' Thanks for your help guys.

dino