Distributed Ruby: dRuby

dRuby is a distributed object system for Ruby. It allows an object in one Ruby process to invoke methods on an object in another Ruby process on the same or a different machine.

The Ruby standard library contains the core classes of the dRuby package. However, the full package also includes access control lists and the Rinda tuple-space distributed task management system, as well as a large number of samples. The full dRuby package can be downloaded from the dRuby home page (see References).

For an introduction and examples of usage see the documentation to the DRb module.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'drb'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install drb

Usage

dRuby in client/server mode

This illustrates setting up a simple client-server drb system. Run the server and client code in different terminals, starting the server code first.

Server code

require 'drb/drb'

# The URI for the server to connect to
URI="druby://localhost:8787"

class TimeServer

  def get_current_time
    return Time.now
  end

end

# The object that handles requests on the server
FRONT_OBJECT=TimeServer.new

DRb.start_service(URI, FRONT_OBJECT)
# Wait for the drb server thread to finish before exiting.
DRb.thread.join

Client code

require 'drb/drb'

# The URI to connect to
SERVER_URI="druby://localhost:8787"

# Start a local DRbServer to handle callbacks.

# Not necessary for this small example, but will be required
# as soon as we pass a non-marshallable object as an argument
# to a dRuby call.

# Note: this must be called at least once per process to take any effect.
# This is particularly important if your application forks.
DRb.start_service

timeserver = DRbObject.new_with_uri(SERVER_URI)
puts timeserver.get_current_time

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/ruby/drb.