Props to Andy's solution - thats pretty awesome... hopefully not everyone needs that!
We’re developing the site but the day to day running is down the client (but
they have lots of power from various sources, redundancy and sysadmins to
type the password back in).
Is the client trying to keep the code hidden from his own sysadmins or
are you trying to hide it from the client?
The first option 
Cheers,
Andy
Or if there is any way so that I can encrypt my code
without interrupting the execution of the application.
If your client is determined to access your code even an encryption of
the Ruby source code will not be sufficient. In order for MRI to
interpret Ruby it must be decrypted. If the client has full access to
the system then this means that they also have access to the encryption
keys.
This is the same issue that makes decrypting DVDs possible. The keys
must be available to the system performing the decryption. Now maybe
doing this will discourage a client from making the attempt, but if they
are determined then there’s nothing stopping them from hiring someone to
“crack” your encryption. But, as I said it’s not really cracking it
since the encryption keys exist in a location where the client has
access.
Indeed, finding them in memory. I believe though that the requirement is to stop casual looking/tampering by the company’s sysadmins rather than to stop a dedicated expert cracker.
Cheers,
Andy
Thanks Skip and I agree with your hope.
There are so many weird things I’ve done on this project, it’s been a great/interesting experience…
Cheers,
Andy
Bad news on that front, all the sys admins I know use Ruby. They start with Puppet and then start writing their own applications.
Sys admins, by virtue of their job, are highly skilled individuals. Least all the ones I know.
YMMV
In a way, you can praise yourself lucky, in my years of work (and that’s quite a lot of years actually) I’ve come across all kinds of sysadmins: very knowledgable people, capable people, people that think they are capable, people that are complete and utter fools, citing things they picked up from some magazine, completely misunderstood, but still think they got their position with good reason, people that know they are incapable of their job and try to make me do their work for them.
Guess it all depends on what company you work with and especially in midsize and small companies there’s a huge difference in knowledge and experience when it comes to IT staff.
Getting a bit OT here, but reading this brings back so many memories…
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
You can also do fun things with ruby2ruby, eg
require 'rubygems' require 'ruby2ruby' class Secret def secret_method %w(I am secret).each {|p| puts p} end end
puts Ruby2Ruby.translate(Secret)
outputs: class Secret < Object def secret_method ["I", "am", "secret"].each { |p| puts(p) } end end
In theory an interested person could attach themselves to one of your ruby processes with gdb and if they knew enough about the ruby c api they could load up stuff like ruby2ruby and inspect your classes.
Fred