Rubygem version restriction doesn't allow for multiple platforms

[djberg96]

Select Topic Area

Product Feedback

Body

Just tinkering with rubygem packages on github recently because why not. However, I noticed something.

In the standard rubygems server you are allowed to have multiple platforms for the same gem version. For example, if you gem search -r sys-uptime you will see sys-uptime (0.7.6 ruby universal-mingw32), one for Windows (universal-mingw32) and one for everything else (ruby), because they have slightly different dependencies but they are both the same version (0.7.6).

It appears that github does NOT allow that, and will complain that a "version already exists" if I try to upload a Windows-specific version of the gem. I would like to be able to put up both.

[wwahammy]

I'm glad someone else noticed this. This is a real pain.

[mcorino]

Just encountered this problem too. Is this going to be fixed anytime soon? Without proper support for multiple platforms for (mostly binary) gems this registry is pretty useless for me.

[bcdanieldickison]

Oof, I just ran head-first into this issue today. Would be great to see this fixed.

[marstaik]

Hey, this needs a big bump. This seems like a fatal flaw, and the workarounds are not pretty.

[chjasonwu]

I'm not sure if this is related, but I successfully pushed the platform-specific gem. However, Bundler fails to locate it locally even after reporting that it was successfully fetched and installed.

[elcuervo]

How did you managed to push the same gem for multiple archs? Using any of the workarounds?

[igillis-clara]

Sharing my experience:

• Uploaded a platform-specific gem for a single platform (arm64-darwin)
• When I then tried to use it, Bundler failed to locate it locally even though I can see it's present

then, I thought maybe the issue was not having all platforms in my Gemfile.lock published

• Tried to go upload multiple platforms
• Failed because the version restriction doesn't allow it

People are mentioning workarounds - what are they and is there any official documentation about native gems?

[elcuervo]

AFAIK the GH Registry does not support multi arch gems and there's no way out it.
Rubygems does if it's a public gem. As for private support we ended up setting a GemFury account since they do support it.

[briceburg]

I was impacted by this as well... of course after spending much effort creating platform-specific build/publish workflows + gemspec changes. the idea was to package gems that contain binaries matching the consumer's platform -- instead of 1 large gem w/ all platform binaries.

rubygems has supported this for a long time, e.g. see all the platform variants for the blake3-rb gem.

how do we know if this gets on github's radar to support?

here's an example workflow:

name: Publish Gems

on:
  release:
    types:
      - published
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: read
  packages: write

jobs:
  publish:
    name: Publish ${{ matrix.target_platform }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        include:
          - target_platform: arm64-darwin
          - target_platform: arm64-linux
          - target_platform: x86_64-linux
    env:
      RUBYGEMS_HOST: https://rubygems.pkg.github.com/briceburg
      TARGET_PLATFORM: ${{ matrix.target_platform }}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
        with:
          ruby-version: "3.1"
      - name: Prepare gem credentials
        run: |
          mkdir -p ~/.gem
          printf -- "---\n:github: Bearer %s\n" "${GITHUB_TOKEN}" > ~/.gem/credentials
          chmod 0600 ~/.gem/credentials
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
      - name: Build gem
        run: |
          rm -f test-gem-*.gem
          gem build test-gem.gemspec
      - name: Push gem to GitHub Packages
        run: |
          gem_file=$(ls -*.gem)
          gem push "$gem_file" --key github --host "$RUBYGEMS_HOST"

and example gemspec:

require "rubygems"

SUPPORTED_PLATFORMS = {
  "arm64-darwin" => "test-binary-darwin-arm64",
  "arm64-linux" => "test-binary-linux-arm64",
  "x86_64-linux" => "test-binary-linux-amd64"
}.freeze
target_platform = ENV["TARGET_PLATFORM"]&.strip

unless target_platform && SUPPORTED_PLATFORMS.key?(target_platform)
  supported = SUPPORTED_PLATFORMS.keys.join(", ")
  raise "TARGET_PLATFORM must be set to one of: #{supported}"
end

target_binary_path = File.join("exe", SUPPORTED_PLATFORMS.fetch(target_platform))
unless File.exist?(target_binary_path)
  raise "Expected binary #{target_binary_path} for TARGET_PLATFORM=#{target_platform}"
end

Gem::Specification.new do |spec|
  spec.name = "test-gem"
  spec.version = "0.0.1"
  spec.metadata["allowed_push_host"] = "https://rubygems.pkg.github.com/briceburg"

  gemspec = File.basename(__FILE__)
  spec.files = [
    File.basename(__FILE__),
    target_binary_path,
    ...
  ]
  spec.files += Dir["lib/**/*"].select { |path| File.file?(path) }
  spec.files.uniq!

  spec.bindir = "exe"
  spec.executables = ["test-entrypoint"]
  spec.platform = Gem::Platform.new(target_platform_name)
  ...
end

the first matrix job that publishes wins, subsequent platforms get:

Pushing gem to https://rubygems.pkg.github.com/briceburg...
Error: Version 0.1.0 of "test-gem" has already been pushed.

😢