So you've got a cool app in Ruby, and you want to share it with your friends, but they don't love Ruby as much as you.
What do you do? Package it up along with the Ruby runtime and give it to them. Simple right? Maybe not so.
Thankfully smarter cookies than me, have tackled the problem, here is a map of the current state of play
- Traveling-ruby
- Ruby-packer
- Ocra
- Newcomer Tebako which builds upon principles in ruby-packer
- Tebako is an executable packager. It packages a set of files into a DwarFS file system for read-only purposes, some details about the makeup in this blog post
- evaluated by its author here in an SO post, this is where I randomly stumbled up on it, after working on some of the other ruby packaging projects
- Just announced a remix of Ocra
- Crystal
- Ok maybe this is cheating, but using LLVM and ruby like syntax, it offers an incredibly speedy way to build cross platform, small portable binaries. I've been tickling it to build dependency free MacOS builds here
Homebrew/homebrew-portable-ruby: 🚗 Versions of Ruby that can be installed and run from anywhere on the filesystem.