Traveling Ruby 20150210: smaller, supports Ruby 2.2, Windows (opens in new tab)

Ruby on Windows is hell and it isn't Ruby's fault. I finally ditched a project I had written with Ruby on Windows and opted for Node which has fewer problems compiling native modules. Ruby out of the box runs fine, trying to get thin or Nokogiri to build was worse than trying to get X.org configured to work with vendor video drivers on linux in the 90's

I'm in the process of moving a load of ancient (Rails 1 & 2) apps to new servers. It's a nightmare because these are running on Ruby 1.8.4 and Ruby 1.8.6 which doesn't even run properly on the latest versions of Linux and OS X. There's also dependency issues, the mysql gem won't compile against recent versions of MySQL, and the same with rmagick... That combined with the not-so-strict development practices of 8 years ago has given me many headaches over the last month. Imaging the machines is an option, but we'd rather avoid having to deal with another shellshock situation so decided to put them on new VMs.

This looks very interesting... What's the support like with Rails apps? If we'd had something like this it would have been a breeze (assuming it is 100% self contained like Go applications).

looks cool, but why not use docker instead?

I work in a mainly Python + JVM environment, and this has been very useful in deploying a Rails-based distributed build system (https://github.com/square/kochiku) in our environment.

It’s super easy to build essentially static multi-platform tarballs—on my Mac—that just work in our Linux production environment.

Sounds great. Looking forward to trying it out.

The rb_to_exe never worked that great for me. I also tried Ocra, which works ok -- but the packages end up enormous.