Transform a ruby program into an appimage.
Clone this repo. Make sure that appimagetool is available (you can download it as appimage from https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/releases and put it into your PATH).
To appimagify your ruby project, run build_appimage.sh:
./build_appimage.sh --appdir appdir --sourcedir exampleapp
The goal is to automatically install the needed gems (as specified in the Gemfile), find the ruby entry point (e.g. config.ru) and let the appimage run that. That detection is not implemented yet.
The build_appimage.sh first creates an AppDir with a ruby installation and its dependencies. It adds some scripts to run ruby projects, installs its dependencies (TODO) and then calls appimagetool to create an AppImage out of the AppDir.
Currently, portable ruby is used and provides Ruby 2.6.3, but that might be changed later. That installation is patched slightly so that it works in the modified path structure.
Next step is installing bundler, to be able to install ruby gems projects need.
The target ruby project code is copied to opt/.
When starting the appimage, a wrapper script usr/bin/rubyapp is run. Its job is to prepare everything needed to make the supplied ruby work (so far: call ruby_environment) and then to identify and run the starting point of the target ruby program.
- Make usr/bin/rubyapp smart enough to identify ruby program entry points
- Add a way to supply a custom start command
- Run
bundle installto install dependencies of the target program on image creation - Add a way to provide needed system dependencies (e.g. sqlite3-dev)
- Extract the useful parts of this as linuxdeploy plugin/transform this into one or multiple linuxdeploy plugins
- Make use of https://github.com/AppImageCrafters/appimage-builder to handle system dependencies (and replace portable ruby?)