Can I include a Ruby Gem in a Node.js project?

Question

I know it sounds cray, cray, but I want to use a Ruby Gem that doesn't have an analog in Node. Anyway for me to include a Gem inside Node.js?

Answer 1

Two options:

• write some ruby code, that interfaces with the gem via cli arguments/stdio;
• compile the code to javascript (http://opalrb.org/ or https://github.com/joshnuss/mruby-web-irb, maybe something else).

The second option is crazy and most likely will not work. The first is sane and useable. There are a lot of cases when you have to something like this, especially with java and python libraries. Of course, you can use some other method for IPC like pipes, tcp, 0mq etc, but arguments/stdio is the most simple one.

Answer 2

There is no way to include a Ruby Gem inside node.js unless you can somehow convert it to javascript first (via some tool or manually).