Distributing Ruby along with application?

Question

I have a simple desktop Ruby client which I would like to distribute to a small number of (technical and non-technical) people.

The client will run as a daemon, hence there is no GUI. I only need the client to run on OSX and Linux.

Is there a way that I can distribute a certain version of Ruby with the application and run my client using that version? How would I do this?

Answer 1

Half an answer is that you don't need to distribute ruby to OSX users - ruby is already installed on OSX machines. As long as your code works with Ruby 1.8.7, you are fine on a Mac.