Hello, and welcome to the May newsletter. Read on for announcements about our Open Source Program and a report of the OSS work we’ve done over the past month.

As mentioned in our previous newsletters, we will now be sending out separate updates for the Open Source Program and general Ruby Central organization and community news.

You can expect our general Ruby Central newsletter (the Ruby Central README) in your inbox later this month.

Open Source Program Announcements

RubyKaigi 2025

Ruby Central OSS team members Marty Haught, Samuel Giddins, and Colby Swandale joined over 1,500 other attendees last month in Matsuyama, Japan for RubyKaigi. The popular, deeply technical Ruby conference with a uniquely Japanese spirit provided an inspiring atmosphere for team to connect with Rubyists from around the world.

Marketing Director Rhiannon Payne at the RubyKaigi "campfire" with Marty Haught, Samuel Giddins, and Colby Swandale

Our Security Engineer in Residence, Samuel Giddins, delivered a talk on the challenges of building the sigstore-ruby sigstore client and, most importantly, have crucial in-person discussions with the folks building Ruby, including:

  • The JRuby team: what is the path forward for JRuby’s crypto primitives, and how can we help get JRuby to parity with MRI?
  • Ruby Core: the state of ruby release build reproducibility. The core team accepted, in principle, our proposed improvements. We will be testing and making the archive build reproducible as our immediate next steps. Future reproducibility of built and installed binaries is planned as a follow-up.
  • Gem developers: other projects intersecting with the ongoing "wheels" work, and what a more declarative build system could look like for extensions. Our eventual goals include an improved replacement for extconf.rb and mkmf, which are hard to understand, slow due to serial execution, and duplicate work across different extensions.

The team also participated in the in-person Ruby Developer Meeting, where other Ruby committers met to discuss regular Ruby Core business.

"It was refreshing to see how our community extends far beyond the familiar North American context," said Marty, Ruby Central's Director of Open Source. "I look forward to finding more ways to build bridges with the global Ruby community in the year ahead."

RubyGems.org Policies

We will conclude the review-and-comment period for the new policies for Ruby Central and RubyGems.org on May 20th.  As a reminder, you can send your feedback to legal@rubycentral.org or join the conversation in the #oss-program-ruby-central channel on the Ruby Central Community Slack.

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

bundle doctor now troubleshoots SSL issues

  • The bundle doctor command now includes a new --ssl flag 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.
  • 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 SSL diagnosis output (successful!)

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 for 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:

Contributors to RubyGems.org:

If we missed you, please let us know so we can include you in our shout-outfor !