Blog
20 May 2025
April 2025 RubyGems Updates
Welcome to the RubyGems monthly update! As part of our efforts at Ruby Central, we publish a recap of the work that we’ve done the previous month. Read on to find out what updates were made to RubyGems and RubyGems.org in April.
RubyGems News
In April, we released RubyGems 3.6.7, 3.6.8 and Bundler 2.6.7, 2.6.8. These releases bring a series of enhancements and bug fixes designed to improve the overall developer experience with RubyGems.
Notable improvements include defaulting to a SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH of 315619200 to simplify reproducible builds, sorting gemspec metadata fields to support consistent build outputs, fixing a crash when the compact index API only listed versions, and speeding up Gem::Version#<=> comparisons by 20–50% when version lengths differ.
Some other important accomplishments from the team this month include:
Progress on gems with precompiled binaries
- Following community interest and questions about the initial “wheels” proposal, We opened a GitHub discussion to gather feedback and facilitate conversation. We also invited input from members of the OpenSSF Securing Software Repositories Working Group to help align Ruby’s approach with best practices from other language ecosystems.
- We are now focused on collecting **this feedback into a concrete list of features that will make it easier to use and develop gems with precompiled binaries, guiding the future of RubyGems in this space.
Development of a Bundler 4 roadmap
- The Bundler 4 roadmap has been drafted, aiming to consolidate over a decade of unreleased improvements and breaking changes into a major release.
- The plan is to review and discuss all pending changes, allow users to opt-in and provide feedback, and prepare for a big release in December. This marks an important step toward modernizing Bundler while giving the community a clear path forward.
bundle doctor now troubleshoots SSL issues
- The
bundle doctorcommand now includes a new--sslflag to help users diagnose SSL-related issues. This improvement brings the functionality of the previously separate ruby-ssl-check script directly into Bundler, making it easier to maintain and more accessible to users. - Thanks to @Edouard-chin for contributing this enhancement by porting the script and integrating it into
bundle doctor.
RubyGems.org News
The updates made this month to RubyGems.org reflect a strong commitment to improving user experience, enhancing security, and modernizing the platform. Sponsored hosting for RubyGems.org in April was provided by AWS, Fastly and Datadog.
April 2025 RubyGems stats
In April 2025, RubyGems.org recorded over 4.15 billion total gem downloads, a 51% increase from 2.74 billion in April 2024. This marks the first time in history that monthly gem downloads surpassed the 4 billion mark, highlighting the continued momentum and growing impact of the Ruby ecosystem. Thanks to all of our partners and sponsors helping this to happen!
Looking at Bundler gem downloads trends, usage data shows a clear shift towards modern Ruby versions:
- Ruby 3.4, released in December 2024, already accounts for 13.1% of Bundler downloads.
- Ruby 3.3 rose from 10.4% to 27.9%, making it the most widely used version.
- Ruby 3.2 declined from 28.1% to 21.8%, while Ruby 3.1, which reached EOL in March 2025, fell from 24.8% to 14.1%.
- Ruby 2.7, EOL since March 2023, dropped from 20.4% to 16.1%.
- Older versions (2.6 and below) continued their gradual decline.
These trends reflect a strong migration toward actively maintained, supported Ruby versions. Analytics were powered by **Clickhouse.
The following are highlights of what the team worked on this month:
Progress update on organizations
- Work has resumed on the long-anticipated Organizations feature in RubyGems.org, led by Colby Swandale. After identifying the remaining functionality a few months ago, we’ve now secured budget to complete the work.
- The feature is currently being demoed to a small group of beta testers, with plans to open it to the broader community in the future. We’re looking forward to gathering feedback once Organizations becomes publicly available.
Thank you
A huge thank you to all the contributors to RubyGems and RubyGems.org this month! We deeply appreciate your support and dedication.
Contributors to RubyGems:
- @deivid-rodriguez David Rodríguez
- @Edouard-chin Edouard Chin
- @hsbt Hiroshi Shibata
- @jeremyevans Jeremy Evans
- @martinemde Martin Emde
- @mperham Mike Perham
- @nobu Nobuyoshi Nakada
- @thatrobotdev James Kerrane
- @segiddins Samuel Giddins
- @simi Josef Šimánek
- @skipkayhil Hartley McGuire
Contributors to RubyGems.org:
- @colby-swandale Colby Swandale
- @gingerwizard Dale McDiarmid
- @hsbt Hiroshi Shibata
- @indirect André Arko
- @marcoroth Marco Roth
- @martinemde Martin Emde
- @segiddins Samuel Giddins
- @simi Josef Šimánek
If we missed you, please let us know so we can include you in our shout out!
Learn more about contributing to RubyGems by visiting the RubyGems Contributing Guide. We welcome all kinds of contributions, including bug fixes, feature implementation, writing and updating documentation, and bug triage.