I cover what most people do which is either using build tools on a production server or building containers without them. I understand where you are coming from

I cover what most people do which is either using build tools on a production server or building containers without them. I understand where you are coming from, but I don't talk _specifically_ about this. Basically you need to build your .so files beforehand and then copy them over. If you use the same system as your target you can just copy gems' files around. A good approach (which we did at Red Hat) is to repackage gems as RPMs and then install them as other system packages. But it's a lot of work. Fedora has a whole default Rails stack packaged, though.