Weblogism

Maven and JRuby on Rails

I am currently investigating using JRuby on Rails with Maven 3, and whilst I am still far away from getting a proper running application, I think it is worth summarizing what I have found so far.

JRuby Maven Plugins

An excellent starting point is the set of plugins called JRuby Maven plugins (not to be confused with jruby-maven-plugin to write JRuby mojos, rather than using Jelly). The information is a bit sparse and outdated, but after while tinkering with them, I found them pretty easy to use. To use them, you must first have a JRuby on Rails project:

sebastien@greystones:/tmp$ rvm list 

rvm rubies

=> ruby-1.9.2-head [ x86_64 ]
   jruby-1.5.6 [ amd64-java ]

sebastien@greystones:/tmp$ rvm jruby 
sebastien@greystones:/tmp$ ruby -v 
jruby 1.5.6 (ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 249) (2010-12-03 9cf97c3) (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_20) [amd64-java]
sebastien@greystones:/tmp$ rails new myapp
      create  
      create  README
      create  Rakefile
      create  config.ru
      create  .gitignore
      create  Gemfile
      create  app
      create  app/controllers/application_controller.rb
. . .

Once the rails project is created, you can now use the jruby-maven-archetype:

sebastien@greystones:/tmp$ mvn archetype:generate -DrailsVersion=3.0.3

(Documentation says it is -Drails.version=3.0.3, but it is incorrect). The jruby-maven-archetype currently is number 21, so you can enter its number at the prompt, as well as its current version number (0.23.0), and then the groupId, the artifactId of your app (here myapp, like the rails app), the version, and the package name.

Once the application is set up, you should be able to run it with the following command:

sebastien@greystones:/tmp$ cd myapp
sebastien@greystones:/tmp$ mvn rails3:server

You should then be able to access your app at http://localhost:3000/.

bundle command

bundle is a great addition to rails 3; unfortunately, it is not available from maven commands provided by JRuby maven plugins yet. That’s why I wrote the following addition to these plugins, bundle-maven-plugin. It is still ongoing work, so it is still a bit rough, but it should do the trick for bundle install, update, package, exec and config commands.

Making a war

This is the next step in the process… and I haven’t had the chance to get to it yet. However, it looks like warbler is the tool for this task, so I’m guessing this will be another post.