How to automatically export oracle environment variable required to run a ruby script?

Question

My ruby script requires connection to an Oracle database. So I need to export ORACLE_HOME and LD_LIBRARY_PATH correctly before the script would run. Is there a way that I can export those env variables without using shell script? I tried to put ENV['ORACLE_HOME'] = '/usr/local/oracle_client' at the first line of the script and it doesn't work. Now the only way it would work is to write a shell script, where export those variables and then run ruby there. The shell script looks like:

export ORACLE_HOME='/usr/local/oracle_client' export LD_LIBRARY_PATH='/usr/local/oracle_client/lib' ruby myscript.rb --options

It's kinda ugly because user has to go inside the shell script to change options. I'm wondering whether there's a better way of doing it. So user can just do at command line: ruby myscript.rb --options

Answer 1

Have a look here.

Answer 2

Why not supply the ruby options as arguments to the shell script? E.g.,

#!/bin/bash    
export ORACLE_HOME='/usr/local/oracle_client' 
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH='/usr/local/oracle_client/lib' 
ruby myscript.rb $*

Obviously you may want to add argument reasonableness checks, etc., but this gives the idea.

Answer 3

Why not call it out via Kernel.system?

system("export ORACLE_HOME='/usr/local/oracle_client'")
system("export LD_LIBRARY_PATH='/usr/local/oracle_client/lib'")