s3kup: the s3 backup tool

I’ve created a tool creating backups on a s3 bucket, I called it s3kup. It’s written in GO and very straightforward to use. It’s somehow a rewrite of an old ruby gem I had for the same purpose.

It’s a command that can take any input from a shell pipeline and store it in a versioned way in a s3 bucket. s3kup has 3 basic commands: push, pull and list.

push

It will store your backup, e.g.:

Gemserver as a docker image

I’ve posted before about how to setup a private gemserver using geminabox, but I’ve just released a docker image that does the all the job:

Speed up your bundler = personal rubygems proxy with cloudfront

If you think your bundle install takes too long, or have a distributed team around the globe, this may help you.

It’s possible to have a cloudfront server pointing to rubygems, and using it as your gems source server. (If you are not aware of what cloudfront is give a look at it)

On this configuration, cloudfront will fetch requests from rubygems.org, and keep them cached on the CDN, so you should expect the first bundle install to take very close time of using rubygems.org, but the second one and forward should have some performance increase. You can also manually set the cache time there.

Build your own private gem server

With Bundler/Gemfile it’s easy to link gems directly to it’s git repository. But some times it’s not ideal. Revisions are not versions, and comparing them is tedious.

Luckly It’s easy to setup a private gem server!

Keeping track of your deploys with capistrano and git

I’ve created a simple capistrano task to keep track of my deploys. When I deploy to a server, it will create a git tag and push it to origin. This way I can keep track of each deploy revision.

after 'deploy:update_code', 'git:create_deploy_tag'

namespace :git
  task :create_deploy_tag do
    puts "[git] creating new deploy tag"
    tag_name = "deploy--#{Time.now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S")}"
    `git tag -a '#{tag_name}' -m 'Deploy: #{Time.now}' origin/production && git push origin --tags`
   end
end

p.s: I use the production branch as my deploy branch. You can change it for master, or anything else.

Vagrant Archlinux Box

I could not find a vagrant archlinux box, so I created one. It’s available on SourceForge. (Archlinux 2011.08.19)

It’s very easy to setup:

gem install vagrant
vagrant box add archlinux http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/sourceforge/v/project/va/vagrantarchlinx/2011.08.19/archlinux_2011.08.19.box
vagrant init
vagrant up

You can download it manually too.