Running Rails/Ruby from a compressed archive?

Is there any way to run Ruby apps using an archive of the ruby files
being run? Sort of like a Jar in Java? For my server, I don’t mind all
the uncompressed files, but when I am doing remote development, the
thousands of text files in ruby\lib eat up way too much drivespace.

I tried searching, but I guess I am having problems articulating what
I am looking for. Is there any mechanisms to do this in Ruby?