

Show HN: Badger-Rails - mattvv
http://curiousminds.github.com/badger-rails/

======
bradleyland
This is a nitpick, and I don't mean to diminish the job you guys have done,
but I _loathe_ projects that use metaphorical class/object/script names. I'm
the guy responsible for infrastructure in our organization, so naturally, I
started digging in to see what's going on under the hood.

So I drill down:

lib...

badger...

core...

Claws and teeth? WTF are these? How do they relate to each other?

When I start reading the code, I constantly have to maintain a mental map
between the metaphorical basis of these claws and teeth. It strikes me as
useless mental baggage when I'm trying to understand how something works.

I'm probably a little bit oversensitive to this because of an experience I had
with a Ruby IRC bot library called Autumn [1]. It's a very neat little
library, but I got stuck in a very frustrating pattern. I would get Autumn set
up the way I like it, then not touch it for a long time. Every time I circled
back to it, I had to re-learn what Seasons and Leaves were. They could just as
easily have been named Contexts and Bots.

Sorry for the negativity, because I'm otherwise liking the project. I'm going
to give it a shot on our test-build infrastructure!

1: <https://github.com/RISCfuture/autumn>

------
zrail
Mixing deployment-time configuration with your app, including checking the
_root password for your deployment machines_ into source code, seems to
violate best practices pretty violently. Heroku is great specifically because
it separates out deployment configuration from runtime configuration.

------
mattvv
Badger-Rails is a tool that helps you set up any linux server to be a fully
functioning rails environment. It supports deployment like heroku does, using
git.

We also have support for best practices with resque and multiple app servers
baked in :)

~~~
riffraff
> Badger-Rails is a tool that helps you set up any linux server to be a fully
> functioning rails environment. It supports deployment like heroku does,
> using git.

I strongly suggest putting this as the first sentence on TFA.

------
drewwwwww
not that this isn't awesome, but it's pretty unfair to heroku to describe this
as even close to equivalent to what they do. badger-rails replicates parts of
the deploy experience, but heroku does so much more.

i think the title of the post should be changed to avoid making reference to
heroku, as badger-rails can and should stand on its own as a useful tool.

~~~
mattvv
That's true drewwwww. The reason for comparison to heroku though was to draw
on the simplicity of deploying a ruby on rails application, which is otherwise
very difficult. It's easier to explain this to people using heroku then it is
to draw comparisons to peoples experiences with puppet or chef.

To be clear though, badger doesn't just replicate the deploy experience but
also the best practices of setting up a rails server, including scaling an
infrastructure to the same if not better levels then heroku can currently
scale if you have the server power behind it.

We currently use it on one of our own applications that has multiple
application servers and webservers, and use badger-rails to scale whenever we
need to.

------
oldgregg
I've been waiting for something like this for YEARS... can't wait to try it
out.

------
petercooper
Cloud66 is a service that offers something like this (Heroku style
provisioning to your own servers): <https://www.cloud66.com/> (No connection
to them, they just e-mailed me about it a few weeks ago. Looks OK, not tried
it yet.)

~~~
nannorz
Badger-Rails is free. Where as cloud66 costs $7 a month.

------
djbender
What would it take to make `git push badger master` automagically deploy the
app as well?

~~~
nannorz
Setting up post push in the git repo.

------
HalcyonicStorm
Any particular reason why you chose therubyracer instead of nodejs?

~~~
mattvv
No particular reason, just because it's rails default. You can easily switch
up and use Node.js if you like

------
gkop
This is a lot of code for a tool that can only configure RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu
targets for a nginx/Rails/MySQL stack.

------
debacle
Your logo looks like a woman's genitals. I'm sorry for being so blunt, but my
jaw dropped when I opened the tab.

~~~
nnq
Your brain seems inclined to see women's genitals in unrelated graphical
symbols. I'm sorry for being so blunt, but my jaw dropped when I read the
comment.

~~~
debacle
Yes, my biological pattern matching engine has been evolutionarily tailored
for this purpose. In this case I think I'm right.

~~~
nnq
...technically (or better said evolutionary) speaking, our biological pattern
recognition engines are optimized to identify women by things more obvious
than the looks of genitalia, and then to identify patterns indicative of
fertility, one of the few patterns of this set surviving in our modern ideal
of "frail and skinny beauty" being the "big boobs pattern".

though I think you're right with something being wrong with their ...brand:
"badger" is a brit slang alternative for "beaver", as I've just been told (#4
@ <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=badger>), and combined with
the superficial resemblance of the logo (which I'll admit it may exist), makes
me think the whole thing is quite on purpose :)

------
aioprisan
this is fantastic, good job!

------
akelani
YES! Finally someone did this!!! This is awesome!

