Crate : forming your custom ruby application into a packaged, standalone, easily distributable executable
by Jeremy Hinegardner
Behind Crate is the idea that a standalone ruby application
can be formed into a simple installable application to just
drop on a machine and run. An existing ruby interpreter is
not required.
A Crate application is a custom, static build of the ruby
interpreter and all dependent binary extensions required for
your application. Your application's ruby code, the ruby
standard library and all dependent ruby code are packed into
one or more SQLite databases. The final distributable
pieces of a single executable and a few SQLite databases can
be then wrapped up appropriately as an OS X App; a self extracting
executable for Windows; a shar archive, rpm or tarball for
Unixes.
This talk will cover building ruby statically, core
dependencies behind Crate, the steps in making a Crate based
application and a demo of converting an existing gem based
commandline application into a Crate based application.
About Jeremy Hinegardner
Jeremy Hinegardner lives in Boulder, CO and has been programming
Ruby since 2001. He is the author of heel, amalgalite and a few
other little known but well loved gems and packages nginx, HAproxy
and other applications for the Fedora Project. He works for Collective Intellect writing Ruby
applications converting social media data into
information, and in his copious free time plays at being a nature
photographer.