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annotate-gem is command line tool that will add useful comments to your Gemfile. For each gem, annotate-gem will create a comment with the gem's description and the gem's website. For example, a Gemfile containing the following

gem "rails"
gem "nokogiri"
gem "brakeman"

will be converted into something that is more descriptive and is self-documenting:

# Full-stack web application framework. (http://www.rubyonrails.org)
gem "rails"
# Nokogiri (鋸) is an HTML, XML, SAX, and Reader parser
gem "nokogiri"
# Security vulnerability scanner for Ruby on Rails. (http://brakemanscanner.org)
gem "brakeman"

The motivation for annotate-gem is that developers often open a Gemfile and not know what many of the listed gems are actually for. It's hard to track down which gem is providing which functionality. This is a common problem since many gem names do not reflect the actual feature.

If you do not want to install the gem, you can also visit https://annotate-gem.herokuapp.com/ which is a web interface for annotate-gem.

$ gem install annotate_gem

Running annotate-gem itself will add comments to the current directory's Gemfile.

$ cat Gemfile
source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem "pry"
$ annotate-gem
$ cat Gemfile
source 'https://rubygems.org'
# An IRB alternative and runtime developer console (http://pryrepl.org)
gem "pry"

annotate-gem has several options:

$ annotate_gem --help
 Add comments to your Gemfile with each dependency's description.
 Usage: annotate_gem [options]
 annotate_gem [gem name]
 --website-only Only output the website
 --description-only Only output the description
 --new-comments-only Only add a comment to gemfile if there isn't a comment already (for non-inline comments)
 --inline Inline the comment
 -h, --help Show this message
 -v, --version Show version

annotate-gem also works with specifying a single gem name:

$ annotate-gem aasm
State machine mixin for Ruby objects (https://github.com/aasm/aasm)

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/ivantsepp/annotate_gem/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request