Question

I have a Rails app that I need to deploy. Here are the facts:

• The app was developed on Windows and requires Windows binary gems
• The app is to be deployed onto an Open Solaris shared server (Joyent)
• I do not have permissions to install gems on the server
• For the non-binary gems, I can simply do a rake gems:unpack locally and then upload; this works just fine.

So my question is, how do I get the binary gems I need onto my production server?

Answer 1

• The app was developed on Windows and requires Windows binary gems
• The app is to be deployed onto an Open Solaris shared server (Joyent)

You do realise that you can’t run windows binaries on open solaris. Windows is in fact entirely different from solaris…

If the gems are from a third party, you may be able to download pre-packaged binary versions for solaris which someone else has produced. You can then put them in the vendor directory and load them from there rather than installing a gem.

If you can’t get pre-packaged binaries for solaris, you’ll need to get your own solaris machine (using Virtual PC, VMWare, VirtualBox, etc), use it to compile the gems, then pull the binary files out.

If you in fact only have source code which works on windows (eg: you built it yourself, or the person providing the gem only designed it to work on windows), you are screwed. You will need to find a cross-platform replacement.

It would help if you could tell us which gems you are talking about, so people could help track down a more specific solution, and explain exactly what’s going on.