Ruby now has Dir.empty?, making this trivially easy:
Dir.empty?('your_directory') # => (true|false)
In Rubies prior to 2.4.0 you can just get a list of the entries and see for yourself whether or not it’s empty (accounting for “.” and “..”). See the docs.
(Dir.entries('your_directory') - %w{ . .. }).empty?
# or using glob, which doesn't match hidden files (like . and ..)
Dir['your_directory/*'].empty?
Update: the first method above used to use a regex; now it doesn’t (obviously). Comments below mostly apply to the former (regex) version.