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"