Traveling Ruby VS ruby-packer

If you absolutely need a native binary distribution for your apps, there is a project called Traveling Ruby that originated at Phusion, makers of the popular Phusion Passenger Ruby application server. It's worth noting that this project has a number of open issues that are aging and the latest commits are from 2021, so I'm not sure about its current status. There are also important caveats with regard to native extensions and Windows. Given the popularity of packages that require native extensions (like the XML/HTML library Nokogiri), you may find that this solution simply doesn't work for you.

You may be to get a precompiled binary with OpenSSL 1.1 statically linked. Maybe Traveling Ruby? https://github.com/phusion/traveling-ruby

There's really not much else in this space. The main alternative - Traveling Ruby - has limitations on Windows and I don't think it supports Ruby 3.0.

But even with all of the above, you're absolutely right, it is just easier to ship a binary blob. That's where the rewrite totally pays off. I just wonder whether the team has stressed all the options when it comes to keep ruby. There are packaging solutions which ship with its own interpreter, such as Travelling Ruby. And mruby could also generate a binary blob, although they'd have to open another can of works, such as finding replacements for dependencies such as net-ssh, which AFAIK can't be used with mruby. So in the end, maybe they did. And given the prevalence of go products in hashicorp, maybe it makes sense to just invest a bit more in it?

You could try using Traveling Ruby as an alternative to Ocra. I have only used Ocra in the past for this task, but I'd say it's worth a try.

Ruby Packer: distribute your Ruby code as a compiled binary\ (30 comments)

One way around this limitation is to also include a ruby interpreter along with your source code. There are some projects out there that attempt to do just that, each with their own limitations and degrees of success. One such project is https://github.com/pmq20/ruby-packer. With this, you can give it your ruby code and it will bundle it up with a ruby interpreter so that you can hand out a single executable file to run.

Go has been used at Flipp for some time now, although not widely in my team. I wanted to use Go to create a command-line executable, something that Ruby unfortunately isn't capable of doing. (There are options, such as ruby-packer, but it seems like a "heavy" solution and doesn't seem to fit the Ruby paradigm.)