We all need somebody to depend on.
Depend is a tool to find out what RubyGems depend on gems you depend on.
Feelin' a bit woozy? Let me explain.
Gems are things you use to avoid writing code that other people wrote better than you could, or perhaps you're just lazy. That's okay, we're all a little lazy. To prove this hypothesis, I've devised this little application named after a brand of adult diapers. Because I can.
Depend uses the RubyGems.org reverse dependency API endpoint to figure out what gems have a runtime dependency on the gem you ask it about. In even simpler terms, there are a lot of gems out there that depend on Rake or Bundler. That makes sense because those two gems are utility gems that pretty much every single Ruby application ends up needing to run.
There are also gems that are a little less popular but still depended on by a surprising amount of other gems:
Well you're in luck, Depend will tell you just that. First just how many gems have a runtime dependency on a gem you're curious about. But more importantly what those gems are and whether they could benefit from a newer version of that gem they depend on, perhaps because it dramatically improves performance?
This project was inspired by Richard (@schneems) Schneeman and his blog post "Who Does your Gem Work For?".
As a consequence of putting this project together I've fixed an issue in the RubyGems.org reverse dependency API that caused it to return yanked gems and added a new parameter to filter reverse dependencies by either only runtime or development dependencies to get a clearer picture of the gems whose runtime environment a gem services.
I hope to make many more improvements to the RubyGems.org API if necessary in the future as this project evolves.
This project is MIT licensed.