Hosting RubyGems for local use

Last week at work I set up my own RubyGems repository to host some local builds of upstream gems. Following the recommendation on guides.rubygems.org, I tried out Gem in a Box. It works perfectly as advertised, but the setup is largely left as an exercise for the reader (who is assumed to know their way around a web app deployment process).

I’ll run through the process I used both as a step-by-step guide to setting up a reasonably locked-down and authenticated (for upload) gem server, and as an example of how to deploy an arbitrary Ruby web app using a sane, repeatable process.

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