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December 2014

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ANN: ruby2app, a tool for bundling Ruby scripts into standalone Mac applications
by Kevin Walzer 04 Dec '14

04 Dec '14

I'm pleased to announce the initial release of ruby2app, a tool for bundling Ruby scripts into standalone Mac applications: https://github.com/codebykevin/ruby2app ruby2app is a simple command-line tool, inspired by similar Mac tools like py2app for Python, that bundles a Ruby script with the Ruby runtime into a standalone Mac application. It reads a basic configuration file to find the appropriate Ruby installation, compiles a small C program that embeds the Ruby interpreter, copies the entire Ruby installation into the application bundle, and re-links the relevant libraries with the main executable. Ruby must be compiled with the "--enable-load-relative" flag for ruby2app to work. At present the tool is primarily geared for Ruby-Tk applications, since Tk is the best-supported open-source GUI framework with Ruby bindings on the Mac in 2014, and (not coincidentally) is the one I use. But I invite others to submit patches to add support for other UI frameworks as well; Qt support might be a good candidate. Support for RubyMotion is outside the scope of ruby2app, as RubyMotion presumably has its own toolchain. I am still in the process of learning Ruby, and in fact wrote this tool to be certain that I could deploy a Ruby-Tk application in a convenient manner on the Mac desktop. There are no other current tools that provide basic support for deployment of an open-source Mac application written in Ruby. Ruby-Cocoa and MacRuby are effectively dead and their tools (standaloneify.rb) are obsolete, RubyMotion has its own toolchain, and crate and rubyscript2exe do not support current versions of Ruby. I do have a decade of experience writing Mac applications in Python, Perl and Tcl using the Tk toolkit, so I adapted some ideas from bundling tools for those languages in creating ruby2app. ruby2app is written in Bash, and thus should be easy to read and modify as required, and should fit in well to any application building toolchain. ruby2app is available under the MIT license, and feedback is welcome. Thank you, Kevin -- Kevin Walzer Code by Kevin/Mobile Code by Kevin http://www.codebykevin.com http://www.wtmobilesoftware.com

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