Rails - Sep 2006 - Distributing a Rails Application

Dear all,

My plan is to distribute my own rail-based CMS application as an 
opensource package. However, I am trying to find out what is the most 
effective and professional way of doing this.

I am wondering whether it is possible and legal to distribute an 
all-in-one package (requiring no external installs) such as this: 
http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/rails.html but 
to make it available for all platform.

I also would like to hear advices based on your experience about the 
best way of distributing a rail application in a way that will be 
simplest for begining users to use. This question pertains to whether I 
should release this as a Ruby Gem -- and whether I should include Rails 
and other libraries within this gem -- and also whether I should even 
include SQLITE into my gem.

My goal is to make it as easy as possible for beginning users to use my 
application, but I should also take into context what system 
environmenet most users will be running in -- whether hey will have 
shell access and certain permissions, etc. Since I am running my own 
box, my requirement will certainly not be the norm. I would like to hear 
your voices.

Thank you,

Sharkie

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On 9/25/06, Sharkie Landshark
<rails-mailing-list-ARtvInVfO7ksV2N9l4h3zg@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> My plan is to distribute my own rail-based CMS application as an
> opensource package. However, I am trying to find out what is the most
> effective and professional way of doing this.
Sharkie,
      I have thought about this too, as I have similar requirements.

For instance I have to distribute a Rails app with the following limitations:
-multiple O/Ses (limits me to cross platform gems only)
-1-click installation (automatically install Ruby, Rails and necessary gems)

My thinking is - assume nothing on the part of the user (even Ruby or Rails
knowledge).

In that case, I need to deliver platform-specific package managers, I need
to have these deployments integrate with external automatic update mechanisms
(so that customers can get critical updates like security fixes).

Also any dependencies that install silently (cross platform gems, mongrel
vs apache, sqlite vs MySQL) are inherently better and easier.

For Rails savvy customers, I don''t know if distributing as a gem is the
right
way to do things, but it may be appropriate in some contexts. For instance
it might provide a convenient way to obscure your Rails source (to prevent
support headaches when customers fiddle with it, and prevent people
picking through it for weaknesses).
> I am wondering whether it is possible and legal to distribute an
> all-in-one package (requiring no external installs) such as this:
> http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/rails.html but
> to make it available for all platform.
Easily checked by looking through the license agreements for the
1-click installers. Most have a section that describes the terms
under which they can be redistributed.

regards,
Richard.

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