This is a list of the 30 most downloaded Ruby projects (according to RubyForge).

Rank Project Downloads
1

Ruby Installer for Windows

A self-contained installer that includes the Ruby language, several popular extensions, an HTML Help based API reference, and the "Book of Ruby" courtesy of Huw Collingbourne. Platforms: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7.

 4,139,490
2

RubyGems

RubyGems is the Ruby standard for publishing and managing third party libraries.

 2,314,764
3

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework for the MVC pattern that includes both a template engine, controller framework, and object-relational mapping package. Everything needed to develop web-apps that can run on CGI, FastCGI, and mod_ruby.

 1,232,125
4

Instant Rails

Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all pre-configured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it. It does not modify your system environment.

860,686
5

Rubot

Feature-rich framework for easy development of MediaWiki bots. Contains a stand-alone base library, utilities for common tasks and adapters for advanced bots (monitoring, analysing, etc). Is able to use MediaWiki's build-in API but can even run without!

 785,089
6

FLVTool2

FLVTool2 is a manipulation tool for Macromedia Flash Video files (FLV). It can calculate a lot of meta data, insert an onMetaData tag, cut FLV files, add cue points (onCuePoint), show the FLV structure and print meta data information in XML or YAML.

 342,549
7

RMagick

RMagick is moving to GitHub! See our new repository at: http://github.com/rmagick/rmagick. RMagick is an interface to the ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick image processing libraries. See http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/ for prereqs, install FAQ, more.

 262,297
8

Net::SSH

Net::SSH is to SSH as Net::Telnet is to Telnet and Net::HTTP is to HTTP. Perform non-interactive SSH processing, purely from Ruby!

 253,245
9

PHPRPC for Ruby

PHPRPC is a Perfect High Performance Remote Procedure Calling that works over the Internet. It's secure and fast. It has a smaller overhead. It's powerful and easy to use. This project is implements of PHPRPC client and server for Ruby.http://phprpc.org

 234,872
10

Redmine

Redmine is a flexible project management web application: issues tracking, news, documents and files management. Issue tracking is now hosted at www.redmine.org

 226,830
11

Rake

Rake is a Ruby make-like utility using standard Ruby syntax for the build specification file.

 188,411
12

codeforpeople

dozens of ruby libraries released by codeforpeople.com

 178,157
13

Seattle.rb Projects

Seattle.rb's treasure-trove! hoe, ruby2ruby, image_science, rails_analyzer_tools, flay, flog, and many many others.

 164,619
14

Active Support

Utility classes and extension to the standard library that were required by Rails, but found of general use.

 164,312
15

SQLite-Ruby

A Ruby interface for the SQLite database engine.

 148,926
16

ActiveRecord

Implements the ActiveRecord pattern (Fowler, PoEAA) for ORM. It ties database tables and classes together for business objects, like Customer or Subscription, that can find, save, and destroy themselves without resorting to manual SQL.

 148,289
17

Ruby

Main Ruby language project for providing a mirror of the Ruby releases, tracking bugs, etc.

 140,957
18

Win32 Utils

The Win32Utils project is a series of libraries that provide Ruby interfaces to various Windows systems and services. This project only supports Windows 2000 and later.

 139,156
19

Action Pack

Eases web-request routing, handling, and response as a half-way front, half-way page controller. Implemented with specific emphasis on enabling easy unit/integration testing that doesn't require a browser.

 132,169
20

Instiki

A wiki clone pretty and easy to set up. Runs on Rails and focuses on portability and stability. Supports file uploads, PDF export, RSS, multiple users and password protection. Some use Instiki as a CMS because of it’s ability to export static pages.

 126,435
21

Ruby/DBI

Ruby/DBI develops a database independent interface for accessing databases - similar to Perl's DBI.

 122,581
22

Ruby Enterprise Edition

Ruby Enterprise Edition is a branch of Ruby, which includes an enhanced garbage collector and developer tools. This allows one to reduce memory usage of Ruby on Rails applications by 33% on average.

 118,653
23

ParseTree - ruby parse tree tools

ParseTree is a C extension (using RubyInline) that extracts the parse tree for an entire class or a specific method and returns it as a s-expression (aka sexp) using ruby's arrays, strings, symbols, and integers.

 117,530
24

Watir

Watir is a testing tool for automating browser-based tests of web applications. It is a Ruby library that works with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

 117,068
25

Amazon EC2 Query API RubyGem

NOTE : WE'VE MOVED. See the news or jump to our new home : http://github.com/grempe/amazon-ec2/tree/master

114,183
26

Action Mailer

Simplifies the creation of mail service classes that uses Action View (from Action Pack) to render the body templates.

 110,919
27

Nitro

Nitro is an efficient, yet simple engine for developing professional Web Applications using the Ruby language.

 101,185
28

FreeRIDE

The FreeRIDE project is a pure Ruby Integrated Development Environment.

 99,064
29

Mongrel

A small fast HTTP server for Ruby and JRuby that can be used to host web frameworks directly with HTTP. Please report tickets on the Mongrel website: http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/ .

 96,004
30

typo

Typo is a lean weblogging engine powered by rails. It supports XMLRPC posting, ping/trackback, comments, textile, markdown, categories, all common exports, fulltext search and so on.

 90,775

View the full list of the top 100 downloads at RubyForge…

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