Need opinions on a Rails app as a framework

[Chason Choate]

I have an interesting use case for Rails and I would greatly appreciate this community's opinion on the matter. 

I'm curious if it's possible to build a Rails app that can accomplish the following:

Environment stipulations

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* Must run on the JVM so JRuby.

* The app will not have internet access in production. (We still have build servers that can package gems)

Ideal functionality

-------------------------------------------------------------

 

* The main Rails app should be able to support a variable amount of engines.

    * I have played with this and it can be done by tweaking the Gemfile to load the engines.

    * Downside is we now have to disregard the Gemfile.lock to accommodate additional engines being added at any time.

* Engines should be drop-in ready.

    * The engines should come packaged with all the gems they need to run.

* There should be no additional installing steps after dropping in an engine.

    * That means no 'bundle install' or anything else.

So my major concern at the moment is with the gems. When I drop in an engine and restart the server is there a way bundler can pick up the packaged gems within the engine without any install step? Maybe playing with the GEM_PATH or something? Anyway I would like to hear your opinions and see if we can figure something out. Thanks for checking this out!

[Timothy Mukaibo]

Look into Bundler, especially the 'bundle install --deployment' option. I package my app into a binary artifact (using .deb, as we run on Ubuntu), and then no internet access is required to bundle install and start the app server.

The caveat is, I don't know what differences there are (if any) with JRuby. Would you package as a .WAR file? How does Bundler work? These are the things you should figure out. I would be quite interested if you could post back here with your solution!

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[Matt Jones]

I think you're going to wind up fighting pretty hard against Bundler to do this. One good place to start is likely the Warbler community, as they've got experience deploying applications in a self-contained method as you've described.

I'd also recommend pushing back on the "absolutely no install" requirement; what's the motivation? It seems to me like there's not much space between users can "write files on the web server and restart it" and users who can run a command...

--Matt Jones