Heartbeat - manage your Rails Apps from a web control panel

Posted in Ruby on Rails, Heartbeat | 7 comments Comments

Derek
Derek
20
Jun

The demo is up – take Heartbeat for a spin.

It’s a single-web page control panel that lets you run any rake task within your application’s directory, from deployment to tests to migrations. If you can write a rake task, Heartbeat can execute it! Additionally, you can use it to monitor the uptime of your URLs.

The app makes extensive use of RJS templates and AJAX.

Heartbeat was built by myself (Derek Haynes) and Charles Brian Quinn of Highgroove Studios during the 24-Hour coding marathon that was Rails Day 2006.

We’ve got big plans for Heartbeat, especially as it relates to Slingshot, our Rails Business Hosting Service. Stay tuned.

Comments

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  1. Ezra said about 2 hours later:
    Very cool guys!
  2. Ben Askins said 1 day later:
    This is cool. Any chance of supporting URLs sitting behind HTTP authentication?
  3. Edgar said 1 day later:
    Nice, I'll test it
  4. mr neighborly said 1 day later:
    Just a quick heads up guys; there's already a Linux daemon for HA clustering called heartbeat. I don't know if this really matters to you or not, but I thought I'd throw it out there for the sake of disambiguity. :) Moving along, this looks awesome. I'm psyched about using it; I've been wondering when more tools like this would be available.
  5. Derek said 1 day later:

    Ben – We are looking at authentication and a couple of other additions. I’d suggest subscribing to our RSS feed. Rails Day was only the beginning!

    Mr. Neighborly – Thanks for the heads up…we’ll look into that.

  6. bryanl said 1 day later:

    How about making this a plugin? I’m still not comfortable with the whole “I give you my password, you run rake tasks on my server bit”

  7. Charles Brian Quinn said 1 day later:

    bryanl: Part of the cool factor is there is nothing to install, but I’m with you on your security issues.

    One thing you can do is lock down a user account that can only deploy and run rake tasks. You might already do this if you use capistrano for deployment. The low-down on linux:

    $ useradd -m -G users -s /bin/bash rails_user

    $ passwd rails_user

    $ chown -R rails_user:rails_user /path/to/my/app

    For future versions, we’ll definitely provide some more tips on using linux/osx to create a user that just has these permissions, but for now, you have to do that part yourself. Thanks for the suggestion!

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