How do I package a rails as a standalone executable.

Question

I've been developing a web application and a lot of customers are asking if they can host the application in their network (for security reasons). I have been looking for a way to package up a rails app into a single executable (with server and all), but haven't been able to find anything. My other requirement is that we distribute it without the source. Because of that I was looking at JRuby and Warbler. The end product should run on linux or windows. Has anyone done anything like this before, or can anyone point me in the right direction.

Thanks

Answer 1

My best guess would be to use JRuby and the JRubyCompiler, although I have no idea if you could compile a whole rails project (including all the required gems). I got it to compile a small ruby script though. Anyway, if you succeed, you could package those in a jar or war and deploy that as a contained application.

Answer 2

It doesn't sound like you necessarily need to package it as an executable, as long as the code is obfuscated. I personally haven't needed to protect any of my code, but a quick google search returned this product http://rubyencoder.com/. I'm sure there are others out there, but the basic idea is that your code is unreadable and cannot be reverse engineered. This would allow you to run a standard rails environment without giving access to your source code.

Answer 3

If you have the budget and really want to outsource this, the Github guys partnered with BitRock to build their cross-platform installable product (Github Firewall Install). BitRock has this case study on their website.