Options for distribution of an offline Ruby on Rails application

Question

I am developing an application in using Ruby on Rails, mostly as an excuse to learn the language.

This is not intended to be a web-based application - and perhaps I

Answer 1

Note, Slingshot appears to be a dead project (see comments). I'll leave this answer here for historical purposes and the off-chance that it comes back

Joyent's Slingshot might be a good bet.

Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications like a standard desktop application, which work online and offline (with synchronization), have drag and drop, and interact with all the other desktop applications.

With Joyent Slingshot:

• Create a hybrid Web/desktop application
• Synchronize online and offline data
• Use the same code for online and offline application(s)
• Deploy and update your application easily
• Drag into and out of application

Here are some further links to help with your evaluation and/or to help you get started:

• Introducing Joyent Slingshot
• Basic application walkthrough
• Slingshot wiki

Answer 2

Gears on Rails maybe?

Answer 3

I have personally never needed to do this. But, I have ran across this tutorial http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/rails.html that I think will be helpful. The tutorial covers how to actually convert a rails app into a standalone exe file.

Answer 4

The way most people ship ruby programs, including Rails webapps, as a standalone exe is via rubyscript2exe. They describe how to package a Rails application at http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/rails.html. Ruby, Rails, and all the associated libraries will be included in the EXE file.

As others mentioned, Ruby is not necessarily Rails and if you really want an easy way to write a distributable GUI application in Ruby, Shoes is an excellent place to start looking.

Answer 5

You do not specifically say whether it is supposed to be a GUI application or not. From the other answers, I would guess so.

Therefore, you need to clarify what your goals are. RoR is a specialized framework for web applications. If your goal is to learn RoR, I'd say to get yourself some inexpensive web hosting and make yourself an app. If your goal is to learn Ruby, not necessarily Rails, then Shoes, IronRuby, JRuby, MacRuby and others may be good options to look at.

Answer 6

You could always consider compiling your Ruby to JVM byte-code (via JRuby) or .NET byte-code (via IronRuby) to distribute to people who have those virtual machines and don't want to install a Ruby runtime.

You might want to check out Shoes for building desktop applications in Ruby. Rails really is tuned for building websites.