This year in open source
So the year is coming to a close and I’d like to communicate some wee open source tools I’ve been working on this past year.
Below is a list of open source tools I have released recently. I would not go as far as to call them open source projects as there is rarely anyone involved in these projects apart from me. I learnt at frozen rails that its great to get involved with other peoples open source projects instead of going out on your own all the time. (something I have a habit of doing.)
If anything here catches your eye, or you want to use it, get involved.
Chef Cookbooks
I have been building a fair amount of server infrastructure lately and have been using the excellent chef tool to help with this.
Along the way I have released a few cookbooks which I have extracted from the work I have been doing. These are in a relatively rough state but do work and are in production use. If you want to help me improve any of these, please go for it.
chef-squid
chef-oh-my-zsh
chef-ipcoffeetables
chef-backup
chef-locales
Deployment recipiez
I have been doing a lot of varied application deployments, all with capistrano. For the last couple of years I have been maintaining a collection of customs scripts which I was including in each project. Versioning was becoming difficult and git submodules are not an amazing workflow.
With bundler its possible to manage dependencies well and it can be used outside of rails projects. Recently I have been writing messaging apis in NodeJS and deploying quite successfully with capistrano and a few setup scripts.
With recipiez its possible to setup a node deployment with upstart, nginx, logrotate and monit. This creates a nice “production ready” environment for deploying node apps.
I have packaged it up and released it as a gem. Instructions for use are in the Readme.
OpenSSL Extensions
This is a library written by Nathaniel Bibler of Ruby5 fame. I have used this extensively in an SSL certificate reselling app I have been working on which has not yet seen the light of day.
This library was my first github pull request success. Where you open a pull request, discuss the change with the author, make a few alterations, then it gets merged upstream!
Wee Flickr
This is a little sinatra app which is meant to get deployed to heroku. It allows me to include images in blog posts very easily and give me a little textile snippet to paste into blog posts.
This scratches a very specific itch but is a example of a sinatra app communicating with the flickr api. It also has a random image function which give a random image from your flickr stream. This is used on my random flickr desktop script which I use at work.
Solon
This is a gem for integrating with sage pay server. It lacks the standard api of activemerchant but as the service is offsite it doesnt work that well with the activemerchant api.
Using it might help you if you are doing a sage pay integration within a rails app.
Merry Christmas!
