

On Bushido, launch apps from github repos - jerome_etienne
http://jacquesmattheij.com/the+best+thing+since+sliced+bread

======
sgrove
EDIT: And we're back! The hn-facing server should be able to stand up to a bit
more of a beating now, and I've increased the background workers (cheating a
bit, since normal bushido apps can't do that yet), so we should be able to
tear through the queue much more quickly.

Edit: I've put in a different public server (outside of the normal rotation)
for everyone to hit. It's a single box instead of the elastic cloud - so it'll
be a bit slower launching for everyone trying it out, but it'll keep the
normal sites we run going snappy.

Wow, big thanks to Jacques for such a kind article. He, and several other on
hn, have been wonderfully helpful all along the development of Bushido.

If there are any questions feel free to post them here, and I'll do my best to
keep up with answering them!

Feel free to shoot me an email at s@bushi.do with any questions or you're
looking to get into the beta - be sure to mention hn :)

Oh, and here's a totally gratuitous video for everyone wondering wtf this is,
and wondering to themselves, "how can I deploy ~20 apps in 2 minutes?":
<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/412963/bushido/bushido_hill.mov>

I'll start collecting some of the questions here:

Q: It's stuck at 8%! A: Yup. Bushido is self-hosting, because we want to have
the same experience as our users. We give everyone 1 background worker for
free - and we haven't needed to have more, up until now. We'll add this in
later, but for now, just let it hang out for awhile, until the DelayedJob
worker goes through the queue and gets to you :)

Q: What happens to my data? A: All the DB data is kept, and backed up
(currently it's daily, will go down to hourly), and can be exported any time.
Data written to the file system isn't guaranteed to be there, unless it's
written to RAILS_ROOT/permanent (or the rails 3 equivalent). If it is written
there, it will be backed up on the same schedule as the DB data.

Q: Where is the application running? A: The applications all run on our
servers (the ones currently taking a bit of a beating). No need for you to do
anything on your side.

Q: What is the end goal of the project? A: Ah, well now, that'd be a bit
boring if we just spilled it out right now :) Suffice to say, one-
click/automated deployment is just the tip of where we're headed right now.
Check out the developer beta if you want to find out more!

~~~
Maxious
Is it just Ruby or can PHP and Python play aswell? Any library/network
restrictions? Any tips for making apps deployable?

~~~
sgrove
Just Ruby (rack) and static (CSS/HTML5/JS) apps right now. Our backend is
built in a way we think should scale to other languages nicely (although we
have to impose some structure), but we're focusing on getting the system and
experience right for one group of people first, and once users are
sufficiently happy from there, we'll build out in different directions.

------
epall
As one of the maintainers of a small open source project
(<http://getontracks.org/>), I see a huge opportunity with Bushido. The
project has really struggled with making it easy for new users to start up,
but even a tutorial doesn't help non-technical users. A few people have set up
hosted versions of Tracks, but getting them to stay up-to-date with progress
on trunk is a challenge.

With Bushido, projects like Tracks finally have a clear route into the hands
of non-technical users. Sure, I can go set up a hosted version of Tracks, but
then I'm taking responsibility that, as a part-time maintainer, I have no
interest in. This rocks!

------
SingAlong
I think I was among the first to test <http://bushi.do> out with
<http://github.com/SingAlong/billmebob> It's a really cool idea for a
platform.

This is even better than Heroku. This, if done right, will probably change the
way SaaS apps are done. It's the way the web's app store should work. Let
people develop apps and let customers host the app, while these two parties
never have to care about the hosting for the app (Bushi.do takes care of it.
No meddling with config. All done by Bushi.do).

~~~
nkohari
I don't know about others, but I don't think I'd be comfortable outsourcing my
infrastructure to someone else to quite this degree. It's sort of like running
a restaurant, but instead of having a kitchen, you go to your customers'
houses and cook for them.

That being said, this is awesome technology, and it's fantastic for open
source projects. I just don't think it will revolutionize delivery of
commercial SaaS apps.

~~~
SingAlong
_It's sort of like running a restaurant, but instead of having a kitchen, you
go to your customers' houses and cook for them._

I would say it's like being an expert chef and passing on your recipe to a
cook who can make the meal in his kitchen and deliver it to the customer. In
this case. You, the developer, are the expert chef, Bushi.do is the cook who
does the work for the customers.

IMO, this turns the web like the mobile's app store/market. There's no
investment for the developer apart from developing the app (for most apps). He
can just put up the git url on Bushi.do. Any customer who's interested in the
app can install it on Bushi.do and pay for the resources while you, the chef,
gets a cut of it.

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manveru
It's stuck at 8% (Inspecting url...).

There is no information about the project, what it needs in order to work,
what kinds of applications it can run, etc.

I'd be very interested in all of that, I assume hitting the frontpage wasn't
too healthy and might have overloaded something, so I'll try again in a few
days.

~~~
sgrove
Hey there,

Yes, I put in some rate limiting for the launchers, and it appears to have
gotten backed up a bit. I'll see what I can do, but we're in a private beta
right now, so I'm more inclined to work on the stuff our regular users are
bringing up and worry about hn-scale later :)

That said, shoot me an email, s@bushi.do, and I'll get you into the beta if
you'd like, with access to the docs. Though honestly, so far the main support
method has been through chat/im/email/skype with me or my cofounder, and we
generally take notes from those conversations and turn that into docs.

~~~
jerome_etienne
if so, maybe you can cache the 'top apps', thus people can see what is it
about ?

~~~
Vekz
Hi I'm working with sgrove on the project. We had considered an app cacheing
or reuse approach for dealing with this influx of traffic, however we wanted
every one to have a fresh install experience.

We very well could have directed you to an existing unclaimed install of a
popular app and saved the resources of spinning up another. We felt that this
could be messy as you might end up on an app that somebody had polluted with
test/demo data and settings.

We cache dependencies for popular apps.

~~~
jerome_etienne
i understand your goal. but realize that current experience is "frozen at
8%"... not a super first impression either.

just suggesting to improve the hn post consequences

------
jrnkntl
Can we change the title of the post to something that describes the matter
better? "On Bushido, launch apps from github repo's" or something like that.

~~~
jerome_etienne
thanks for the suggestion. done

------
alextebbs
A comment/question coming from someone who is obviously a designer... It seems
like Bushido is operating in a similar space as Heroku, and both have the same
purple/dark color scheme and Japanese/Asian theme... Was this intentional, and
if so, what are some merits and drawbacks to branding your product similarly
to that of a competitor?

Of course this is an early beta and branding is of little importance for this
kind of product, but as a designer, it's the first thing that came to mind.

------
kungfooguru
It may be great. But the title should be 'RoR' apps and mentioned earlier in
the article. It sounds much more revolutionary until you learn that fact.

All apps are not Ruby or Ruby on Rails!

~~~
sgrove
No, not all; just the good ones :)

~~~
kungfooguru
And I still think its awesome. I'm trying to try it out right now but seems
overloaded. But as an Erlang web developer I feel left out when tools claims
to do things like 'deploy almost all apps from github!' :)

~~~
sgrove
You're right, we'll have to work on communication for the public-facing side
over the next few days! Thanks for the feedback.

And, I loves me some Erlang, I understand :)

------
sgdesign
I didn't expect the word to get out so fast! I've known about Bushi.do for a
couple weeks now, and it's really as revolutionary as Jacques says.

And I'm really honored that Sean chose to feature a project I'm working on,
LocomotiveCMS, as a way to show Bushi.do's capabilities.

~~~
sgrove
Sacha's an awesome person to work with, for anyone looking for a designer who
understands MVP and UX. I've seen him and Didier work magic with
LocomotiveCMS!

------
daleharvey
Ive been following bushido for a while and think it has awesome potential,
being able to sell hosted web apps without having to go through the process of
building a service infrastructure could bring the benefits of iphone type apps
to a much larger audience

------
seancron
I love this idea. Does it only support Rails apps, or does it also support
LAMP as well?

I tested it with <https://github.com/ginatrapani/thinkup> because I'd be very
impressed if it could set ThinkUp up with no user interaction, but like many
others I'm stuck at 8%.

I'm sure you're getting a lot of traffic from HN now, so I'll wait patiently
:).

~~~
sgrove
Just Ruby/Rails/Sinatra for the near future. As much as we'd like to go after
that, it's not likely something we'll be able to handle.

ThinkUp looks pretty damn interesting though :)

------
patr1ck
In the same vein as this, I did a weekend project to write a mac app / chrome
extension combo which adds a "Clone Now" button to every github page. It works
pretty okay and is available here: <https://github.com/patr1ck/Mitosis>

~~~
sgrove
Very cool - have you emailed the github guys about this? Tom's insanely
focused on the users, and anything that makes github a nicer experience for
them. They might blog about it :)

------
random42
How is it fundamentally different than heroku? (Not trying to troll, genuinely
curious.)

~~~
sgrove
For what we're showing today, the main difference is: No account required to
launch an app.

We'll be showing more and more over the coming week or two as we start to
share developer stories, but I'll give one hint here... <http://locomotive-
engine.heroku.com/>

If you're looking for answers right away or want to try the beta, shoot me an
email at s@bushi.do

------
nyellin
I know links on jacquesmattheij.com get more upvotes, but can't you just
submit <http://bushi.do/>

~~~
bmelton
Given the amount of information on the bushi.do homepage vs. the description
in Jacques' article, I'd wager that would be inappropriate in this case.

~~~
nyellin
That's fair, but I felt that bushi.do would have been equally understood with
an appropriate title or comment explaining the website. In fact, if the same
article had been written on a different blog, I doubt an indirect link would
have been submitted.

------
bluesmoon
perhaps greasemonkey is a good way to get it on the repo page itself

~~~
sgrove
Actually, barring the github guys rushing to integrate with us, we made a
bookmarklet I'll post here in a bit.

Great suggestion by the way.

~~~
kmfrk
I'd prefer an extension that can be synced between devices and
formats/reinstalls.

------
eoghan
Nice. Orchestra does something similar for PHP apps.

<http://orchestra.io/>

------
taken11
its confusing since a lot of github repositories are not ruby, they are not
even running on web servers. a bit more info on bushi.do describing what it
does would be helpful

~~~
sgrove
You're absolutely right - we also need to explain why apps stick around for 24
hours, how to keep them permanently, etc.

Once the ruckus dies down here later today, we'll circle around to that.

------
shareme
sgrove,etc and github..

Very nice..I like it

------
fmkamchatka
Sliced bread is disgusting. I wonder how good this thing is then.

