15.5. Distributing Plugins
After your plugin is complete, you're encouraged to share it with the Rails community at large. The primary requirement to distribute a plugin is a publicly available Subversion server. If you don't have a public Subversion server that you want to expose to the world, there are a number of hosting services that will provide you with space for your Rails project for the low cost of absolutely free. The most commonly used service is rubyforge.org, where you can create a project and get a Subversion server, a project home page, a bug tracker, and a mailing list.
If you place your project on your own Subversion server, you can register the server at http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Plugins. This will cause the server to be added to the sources list generated when somebody does a script/plugin discover command.
As I write this, there isn't really an official online plugin repository, although there have been a few attempts to create one. The de facto standard location is http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins, which allows you to register a plugin and assign it to various categories. Plugin users can rate plugins at that site. A newer plugin repository is www.railsify.com — it has a nice UI, but as of right now, it doesn't have quite as large a collection of plugins as the Agile Web Development site.
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