Archive: posts from February 2009

Brightbox gem 2.3 13 Feb 09

I’m pleased to announce that we have just pushed a new revision to the Brightbox gem up to Rubyforge. 

Version 2.3 of the gem fixes some issues reported to us by our users. A quick summary of the changes from the release notes:

• Removed the Capistrano task which calls the db:check:config rake task. This task was introduced to help with a common config mistake, but just resulted in a different mistake becoming common.
• Removed the Capistrano task which calls rake gems:install. Running this as sudo was causing some permissions errors caused by initialising the Rails stack as root.
• Fixed how we track the commands the gem depends upon, the deploy:check command now works as expected.
• Gem dependencies are now installed by listing them in deploy.rb, extra examples have been added to the boilerplate deploy file.

The change in the way we handle gem dependencies was the reasoning behind making this a minor version release. Previously we simply called the inbuilt Rails 2.2 gem install task.  However we found some issues where customers with fresh deployments when running this command as root would result in files being created that could not then be removed during subsequent deployments. We took the decision to use the inbuilt capistrano dependencies to handle the installation of remote gems (examples are available inside the deploy.rb that the brightbox command automatically generates for you).

Update 24/2/2009: We’ve just pushed a new version, 2.3.2 that changes slightly how the gem dependencies work. You now specify a dependency with an alternate source in your deploy.rb like this:

depend :remote, :gem, "tmm1-amqp", ">=0.6.0", :source => "http://gems.github.com"

Announcing isitruby19.com: tracking gem compatibility for ruby 1.9 5 Feb 09

By now you will all have heard of the release of Ruby 1.9.1 – the first, stable, production-ready release of the next-generation Ruby interpreter.  This has a number of enhancements; RubyGems is bundled with the interpreter, native threads are used instead of green threads and we have a general performance boost all round (amongst many others).  

However, there is a significant barrier to Ruby 1.9 adoption; the compatibility of the gems that we have all come to depend on.  

Which is why we’ve launched isitruby19.com - a site that tracks gems and lists whether they are 1.9 compatible.  Each time you come across a gem that works for you, drop by and leave a comment, so we all get a feel for which gems need some work and which are ready today.

Brightbox sponsor Scotland on Rails 2009 5 Feb 09

I’m pleased to announce that Brightbox will be sponsoring the Scotland on Rails conference in Edinburgh (26-28 March 2009). Alan and Paul (and others I’m sure) have done a great job of putting together what promises to be a thoroughly engaging and stimulating schedule, in fact, leading them to sell out before the early bird offer was over :)

John, David, Rahoul, Caius and myself will all be travelling up to Edinburgh for the event – so please come and say “Hi”.

Of course, never fear, we’ll bring plenty of our famous t-shirts and stickers :)