I’ve put up a first release of Capgem on Rubyforge. It’s available under
the
MIT license.
Capgem is an extension to Capistrano which adds a pack task to
Capistrano so
you can package up your Rails application as a Gem. This is useful if
you
are in an environment where Capistrano’s remote deployment tools aren’t
an
option. Capgem currently adds start and stop scripts for launching your
app
via mongrel even if it is in the Ruby gems directory. You can just type
sudo
start-myapp or sudo stop-myapp from anywhere on the system to launch
once
you’ve installed from your Gem. You can also use ‘gem install -i
/path/to/install yourapp.gem’ to install in a specific location.
Capgem is an extension to Capistrano which adds a pack task to
Capistrano so you can package up your Rails application as a Gem. This
is useful if you are in an environment where Capistrano’s remote
deployment tools aren’t an option. Capgem currently adds start and
stop scripts for launching your app via mongrel even if it is in
the Ruby gems directory. You can just type sudo start-myapp or sudo
stop-myapp from anywhere on the system to launch once you’ve installed
from your Gem. You can also use ‘gem install -i /path/to/install
yourapp.gem’ to install in a specific location.
I’m curious what you mean by “…in an environment where Capistrano’s
remote deployment tools aren’t an option.”? I’m using a custom
deployment task to copy the code up to the server since my svn repos are
behind a firewall. I’m curious what other instances exist where you’d
have to bend Capistrano to do what you need.
I like the idea of being able to pack my apps up into a gem, perhaps
that could be released separately as a rake task or something?
Is it correct to assume that when you say “start-myapp” and
“stop-myapp”, one replaces ‘myapp’ with the name of the application?
Otherwise, how does it handle multiple installed apps?
Sorry for the delayed response…this slipped by me.
In our case we work with systems which are on secure government
networks which do not even have access to the Internet. Therefore we
actually need to be able to burn a CD and transport the application
code that way.
The pack task itself doesn’t actually move the code, so basically
‘rake pack’ does exactly what you’re asking for, creating a gem from
your rails app.
On the last point, you assume correctly - myapp will be replaced with
your application’s name.