CRATE
Packaging Standalone Ruby Applications
Jeremy Hinegardner
jeremy@copiousfreetime.org
@copiousfreetime

COPIOUS FREE TIME
Fedora Ruby
Packaging Gems
•beanstalkd •amalgalite
•haproxy •crate
•libtomcrypt •keybox
•libtommath •launchy
•nginx •heel
•ragel •hitimes
•tinyproxy •htauth
•rabal
•stickler

Crate
&
Amalgalite

SURVEY

PRE HISTORY
RubyConf 2007 (Charlotte, NC)
• Sploitin’ with Ruby
• Aaron Bedra
• Deploying Ruby Runtimes
• Bruce Williams & Rich Kilmer

STORYTIME

PERL 4, 1993

NO CONTROL
• interpreters? - perl probably, python maybe, ruby most likely
not
• what libraries? - openssl? zlib?
• compiler? - quite possibly not

What do you do, when only thing
you know about your
deployment location, is the
Operating System?

AND YOU LOVE RUBY.

YOU MAKE CRATE.

SO WHAT IS CRATE?

embedded Ruby
+ ruby extensions
+ main wrapper
+ standard library
+ application code
Crate based application

RUBYSCRIPT2EXE ?

http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe
Ruby Application
rubylib
exe
Extension
dlls
gems
sitelib
application.exe
eee.exe eee.gz trailer

MY NEEDS
• Minimally Invasive
• do not unpack to a temporary location
• small as can be
• Wide deployment capabilities
• more than linux, mac, windows, cygwin

Statically Compile
embedded Ruby
C + ruby extensions
+ main wrapper
+ standard library
Ruby + application code
Crate based application
Pack into Amalgalite

1 CREATE TABLE rubylibs (
2 id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT,
3 filename TEXT UNIQUE,
4 compressed BOOLEAN,
5 contents BLOB
6 );

Inexact Size Measurements
Executable + C
Ruby libs
extensions
Ruby 1.8.6 2.4 M 8.4 M
Crate/ruby 1.8.6 2.9 M 1.9 M

1 module Kernel
2 # alias the original require away to use later
3 alias :amalgalite_original_require :require
4
5 #
6 # hook into the system 'require' to allow for required text or blobs from an
7 # amalgalite database.
8 #
9 def require( filename )
10 loaded = amalgalite_original_require( filename )
11 rescue LoadError => load_error
12 if load_error.message =~ /#{Regexp.escape filename}\\z/ then
13 loaded = Amalgalite::Requires.require( filename )
14 else
15 raise load_error
16 end
17 end
18
19 private :require
20 private :amalgalite_original_require
21 end

Amalgalite ruby driver is
bootstrapped in its C extension

DEMO

BOOTSTRAPPING

ISSUE #1 - AUTOLOAD
• Problem
• bypasses the require chain setup by amalgalite
• used by rack, active_support, active_record
• Solution
• Port tree style patches?
• custom gem builds?

ISSUE #2 - VIEWS IN WEB
FRAMEWORKS
• Problem
• layout and templates loaded from disk
• Solution
• wait for Rails 3
• sinatra, others, make patches for upstream, if needed.

ISSUE #3 - CLASS RELOADING
• Problem
• Development mode reloads classes
• Solution ( for now )
• production mode when running as crate based apps

ISSUE #4 - NOT WINDOWS
FRIENDLY ( YET )

QUESTIONS?