I really like using [Jeweler] 1 to create and manage gems, but its default behavior is to publish your gem to [rubygems.org] 2 whenever you run rake release. This is great for generally useful libraries that you want to open-source, but not as great when you want to use gems as shared libraries for internal use only (whether because the code contains business secrets or just because it's not something that would be useful to the community at large.)

After a bit of poking around, I figured out how to use Jeweler to manage your versioning, gemspec and git tagging without pushing the result to rubygems.org when running the release task. It turns out to be both obvious and trivial. Just add the following line to the end of your gem project's Rakefile:

Rake::Task[:release].prerequisites.delete('gemcutter:release')