How do I develop self-hosted Rails app

Question

Suppose I have Rails 4 app, call it "Super SaaS". Now my client says he likes my appvery much, but he doesn't want his data to be in the cloud. So he says he would buy a licience from me to deploy "Super SaaS" on his own server. More like Atlassian Jira.

The question is: is there any secure way(in terms of protecting source code) to do that?

Answer 1

While you can probably package up your code as a JRuby application with JAR files and Java byte code, there are decompilers for that, so you can never presume your source to be 100% secure.

Ideally you'd offer some sort of VM appliance that the customer can install, a system image compatible with VMWare or whatever virtualization system they're using. This helps package up a fairly secure environment, but won't protect against a determined adversary trying to get your source code.

If you're giving out your code to someone in any form, compiled or otherwise, you have to have a certain amount of trust. Even compiled executables are not immune to reverse-engineering.