Distributing Ruby apps to non-Ruby-programmer end users on Windows, Linux and OS X is problematic. If you require users to install Ruby or to use RubyGems, they can get into trouble or become frustrated.
Learn why requiring users to use Ruby is inappropriate »
Creating platform-specific packages for each Linux distro and each OS requires a lot of work. Because building such packages requires a fleet of VMs, building packages takes a lot of time.
Introduction in 2 minutes
Traveling Ruby is a project which supplies self-contained, "portable" Ruby binaries: Ruby binaries that can run on any Windows machine, any Linux distribution and any OS X machine. This allows Ruby app developers to bundle these binaries with their Ruby app, so that they can distribute a single package to end users, without needing end users to first install Ruby or gems.
Motivation | FAQ | Walkthrough
Apps packaged with Traveling Ruby are completely self-contained and don't require the user to install any further dependencies or runtimes.
Traveling Ruby is very simple to use and very easy to learn. No complicated tooling to learn. Grasp the basics in just 5 minutes.
Produce packages for multiple OS targets, regardless of which OS you are developing on. This is achieved without the need for heavyweight tools like VMs.
VirtKick is an open source, self-hosted cloud panel, similar to Digital Ocean. Focused on privacy, VirtKick simplifies creating, managing, hosting and providing virtual servers.
"We used Traveling Ruby for our one-click installation package. Traveling Ruby handles even our bleeding edge dependencies, like Rails, very nicely. Without it, the installation process would be long and would be tedious."
CloudFoundry's BOSH is an open source toolchain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large scale distributed services. BOSH can provision and deploy software over hundreds of VMs and performs monitoring, failure recovery and software updates with zero-to-minimal downtime.
Dr Nic Williams is using Traveling Ruby to package the BOSH CLI into self-contained packages that can be downloaded and used by anyone without requiring Ruby and native extensions.
