Show HN: Badger-Rails

bradleyland 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

> 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.

Jmetz1 13 years ago | |

Wow this is sweet

drewwwwww 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago |

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

petercooper 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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

djbender 13 years ago |

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

nannorz 13 years ago | |

Setting up post push in the git repo.

HalcyonicStorm 13 years ago |

Any particular reason why you chose therubyracer instead of nodejs?

mattvv 13 years ago | |

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

gkop 13 years ago |

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

debacle 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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

nnq 13 years ago | | |

...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 13 years ago |

this is fantastic, good job!

akelani 13 years ago |

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