Like many Ruby and Rails users, I rely on an open source software named Capistrano to deploy my apps to the web. I did a quick check today to see if I had the latest version of the Capistrano gem, and was shocked and delighted to see a ton of results over and above the core gem I’m using:
$ gem list -r capistrano capistrano (2.5.19 ruby) capistrano-boss (0.0.1 ruby) capistrano-campfire (0.1.1 ruby) capistrano-cm (0.0.3 ruby) ... [many, many more] ... capistrano_s3 (0.1.1 ruby) capistrano_winrm (0.0.1 ruby) CapistranoTrac (0.5.0 ruby)
There are 43 different results, 42 of which are based on Jamis Buck’s Capistrano. That’s 42 different projects, all based off this single seed.
That’s. Just. Awesome.
Judging solely by the titles I’d guess many of these gems are just small 10- or 20-liners that extend the core Capistrano gem in some narrow way. That’s even more impressive, in my mind. Building something that extensible is hard.
I love “people use and improve stuff I’ve built” as a measure of success.
Filed under: technology Tagged: capistrano, deployment, rails, ruby, success
