Wrapping ruby into one directory

[Cary Fitzhugh]

Hello --

We're looking at using ruby on a product and I had a question about how to package up the ruby interpreter into one
stand-alone directory.

We'd like to have a full ruby interpreter which is not installed on the device. So that the interpreter can be
downloaded on the fly with the ruby scripts, run, and then potentially discarded at a later time.

Almost like ruby2exe but i don't want an exe since we're a linux box. I just want a direectory tree which has the
interpreter and all it's ruby libs, etc. inside.

say the ruby interpreter is in /data/bin/ruby/....
and i have a script foo.rb. I could just run ./data/bin/ruby foo.rb and have this ruby interpreter run.
That same directory could be located in /data/bin/ruby/XXXX/ or in another totally different directory as well.

I can include ruby gems by including the gem/lib directory.
But how do I connect the ruby interpreter with it's /lib/ruby/1.8/... stuff?

Is that directory hardcoded somewhere in the binary?

Sorry I'm not explaining this concept very clearly.

Thanks for any hints. If this has been discussed before please give me some keywords to search the archive for. I
couldn't find anything when I searched.

Thanks,
Cary

[Justin Collins]

I have never used it, but rubyscript2exe is supposed to work on Linux.

-Justin

[Robert Dober]

As long as you install from source that should not be a problem, I
have done it before to carry my Ruby with me on a thumbdrive.*

When you do
/configure --help
you will see a lot of different options, but if IIRC, all you have to do is

/configure --prefix=/myspecial/dir

And you can call your ruby with a full path then.

HTH
Robert
--
C'est véritablement utile puisque c'est joli.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

[Cary Fitzhugh]

Thanks.

Can I move /myspecial/dir to /mynewspcial/dir/45 and it still runs just fine?

Doesn't this hard-code the locations of those files into the binary somewhere? I mean, ruby needs to know where to look
for it's /site/1.8 libs... is that hardcoded, or is it possible that that is a relative path... how cool would that be.
I guess I have the source so I could change that. Anyone have any idea where in the ruby source it puts that value?

Thanks,
Cary

Robert Dober wrote:
> As long as you install from source that should not be a problem, I
> have done it before to carry my Ruby with me on a thumbdrive.*
>
> When you do

> ./configure --help

> you will see a lot of different options, but if IIRC, all you have to do is
>

> ./configure --prefix=/myspecial/dir

[Robert Dober]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 6:48 PM, Cary Fitzhugh <cfit...@echo360.com> wrote:
> Thanks.
>
> Can I move /myspecial/dir to /mynewspcial/dir/45 and it still runs just
> fine?

I do not think so, but why not try?

>
> Doesn't this hard-code the locations of those files into the binary
> somewhere? I mean, ruby needs to know where to look for it's /site/1.8
> libs... is that hardcoded, or is it possible that that is a relative path...
> how cool would that be.

I do not know, I just tried it ;)

[Cary Fitzhugh]

I also found in ruby.c: ruby_init_loadpath()

If I wanted to really make things locked down, I guess that I could change that to not use any hardcoded paths, and just
make everything relative to the location of the binary. add the binary directory/../lib/.....

I think that might work - any comments?

Cary

Robert Dober wrote:
> As long as you install from source that should not be a problem, I
> have done it before to carry my Ruby with me on a thumbdrive.*
>
> When you do

> ./configure --help

> you will see a lot of different options, but if IIRC, all you have to do is
>

> ./configure --prefix=/myspecial/dir