When you encounter SSL errors when installing gems on Windows, the easiest workaround is to change your sources from https://... to http://.... But ... I am an avid user/fan of rails-assets.org and today I suddenly started getting the error on their domain.

So at first I feared that rails-assets had stopped as foreseen (in this ticket), but the site was still reachable, and actually they switched (imho just two days ago) to a new maintainer, which is awesome: the future of rails-assets is safe for now.

But there is no rose without a thorn and now rails-assets enforces TLS (which is actually a good thing), so it is always SSL and gem cannot ignore SSL anymore. Doh! So I was stuck on windows.

I tried to make gem command ignore ssl errors regardless, by creating c:\ProgramData\gemrc with the following content:

---
:ssl_verify_mode: 0

and that partly worked: I was now able to fetch the index, but now I received the SSL error on the first gem retrieved from rails-assets, so I was still not in the clear. I had to make sure the SSL verification actually worked!

Fortunately, after some googling this proved easier then expected! The root cause is that ruby on windows (or openssl) has no default root certificate. So I found a good description how to fix that on windows.

I used the boring/easy/manual approach, in short:

• download the cacert.pem file from http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem. I saved this to my ruby folder (e.g. c:\ruby21).
• add an environment variable SSL_CERT_FILE, so ruby can pick it up. E.g. in your command prompt type set SSL_CERT_FILE=C:\ruby21\cacert.pem. To make this a permanent setting, add this to your environment variables.

I found a few articles that describe easier ways to create a gem. From the entire list of available tools, i want to highlight two: jeweler and (Mr.) bones. Mr. bones seems a very configurable route to take: it allows you to define your own skeletons (application templates) or use those of others, e.g. bort. On the other hand it also seems to do more than i need. Jeweler seems to be very specific in what i does for you, allowing to create a gem very easy and manage your gem locally. Also it is very configurable, so you can immediately create rspec and cucumber folders, fill the wanted rake tasks. It is awesome, and makes starting really easy. So i executed the following command: [ruby] D:\work-git\ruby>jeweler --rspec --cucumber --reek --roodi --create-repo word_automator create .gitignore create Rakefile create LICENSE create README.rdoc create .document create lib create lib/word_automator.rb create spec create spec/spec_helper.rb create spec/word_automator_spec.rb create spec/spec.opts create features create features/word_automator.feature create features/support create features/support/env.rb create features/step_definitions create features/step_definitions/word_automator_steps.rb Jeweler has prepared your gem in word_automator Jeweler has pushed your repo to http://github.com/nathanvda/word_automator [/ruby] which as you can tell created a folder, rspec and cucumber place-holders, prepared my gem and pushed my repository to github! Wow :) Now fill the gem with code :)