Traveling Ruby allows you to easily ship Ruby apps to end users. It lets you create self-contained Ruby app packages that run on multiple versions of Windows, Linux and macOS.
Today I’ve released version 20210206. This release supports Ruby 2.4, bumps all the gem versions, bumps the minimum supported macOS and Linux versions, and fixes some bugs.
It has been a long time since the last release. So this post also adresses an elephant in the room: is Traveling Ruby back?
In my last blog post about Traveling Ruby's future, I said that it's hard to democratize the development of Traveling Ruby because of System Integrity Protection (SIP). Traveling Ruby's build process relies on DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, which is blocked by SIP. This means that:
After some research and experimentation, I've found an alternative to DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, meaning that it's no longer necessary to disable SIP. This significantly changes the ability to democratize Traveling Ruby's development.
A couple of years ago, I had a dream: to make it dead-easy to distribute Ruby CLI apps to end users, without requiring those users to install Ruby or muck about with gems and Bundler. And thus Traveling Ruby was born.
Traveling Ruby hasn't seen updates for quite a while now. Recently I tried making a new bugfix release, but I found it to be more challenging than I had hoped. In this article I reflect on those challenges, as well as on the future of Traveling Ruby.
