From: Erik Veenstra <pan@...>
Date: 2005-01-15T23:01:10+09:00
Subject: Building, Packing and Distributing Ruby Applications


http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/index.html

This URL points to the place where I've dumped my thoughts
about building, packing and distributing Ruby applications.
Theory and practice. The ultimate goal is to be able to
distribute just one executable which contains both the
application and the Ruby interpreter.

That's achieved by the combination of Tar2RubyScript [1] and
RubyScript2Exe [2].

It's definitely worth reading if you have to distribute your
Ruby applications!

gegroet,
Erik V.

 [1] http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/tar2rubyscript/index.html
 [2] http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html

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Summary:

This is how I build, pack and distribute my Ruby applications.
Theory and practice. The ultimate goal is to be able to
distribute just one executable which contains both the
application and the Ruby interpreter.

The three main steps are:

* Create the application in a directory (and its
  subdirectories).

* Convert this directory into an RBA (Ruby Archive) with `a
  ../tar2rubyscript/index.html Tar2RubyScript`.

* Convert this RBA into an executable with `a
  ../rubyscript2exe/index.html RubyScript2Exe`.

I can distribute this executable to my customers as a
standalone application. They don't need Ruby.

They don't need Ruby, because it's embedded in the executable,
along with the application files and libraries and gems.
Everything they need to run the application. To `b run` the
application. Not to install the application. This document
describes a way to create an `tt,b application.exe`. Not a `tt
setup.exe` or an `tt install.exe`.

That are a lot of `tt exe`-s, but it works on Linux, too. OS X
support is working, but not yet released.

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