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I know this is in the vein of hacky solutions, but I tend to use jruby for the purpose of packaging up ruby applications.

This is a good solution. I've used this approach as well for server daemons.

Do you still require the JVM installed in the same way you would the Ruby's VM?

JRuby's ruby VM runs on top of whatever JVM you choose. You just have to make sure you have the JVM in your path.