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I have a Ruby script that downloads web pages containing financial statements for publicly traded companies, scrapes the pages for essential financial data, processes the financial data, and writes the results to a Postgres database.

I looked at the procedure for creating a Ruby gem at http://guides.rubygems.org/make-your-own-gem/ , and I'm considering making my Ruby web-scraping script a Ruby gem. Unlike the Hello World exercise in the example, my script needs a Postgres database ready to go.

I am working on a Rails app (Doppler Value Investing) that displays the stock parameters. Having a Ruby gem that nicely integrates into my app would be smoother and more elegant than the setup I would otherwise use. (At the moment, I have a separate Ruby app that does the scraping work and writes the results to the Postgres database.)

The one hitch I can think of is the need to manually create a Postgres database first. Is there a way to programmatically do this, or do I simply need to include in the README a statement that says something like "You MUST create a Postgres database with the name *db_name*, or this gem will not work"?

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Just include the instruction in the README. Apart from anything else, you can't know ahead of time what privileges the user of your gem is going to have, so you'd have to deal with not being able to create the database programmatically anyway. It's a one-time task, so automating it doesn't make a huge amount of sense.

Once the database is set up, creating the schema automatically does make sense.

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