The Napkin ~ A Blog By Highgroove Studios comments on Heartbeat - manage your Rails Apps from a web control panel

"Heartbeat - manage your Rails Apps from a web control panel": comment by Charles Brian Quinn

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 22:09:27 EST

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!

"Heartbeat - manage your Rails Apps from a web control panel": comment by bryanl

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 14:15:18 EST

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”

"Heartbeat - manage your Rails Apps from a web control panel": comment by Derek

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 12:58:09 EST

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.

"Heartbeat - manage your Rails Apps from a web control panel": comment by mr neighborly

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 12:01:35 EST

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.

"Heartbeat - manage your Rails Apps from a web control panel": comment by Edgar

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 11:38:16 EST

Nice, I'll test it

"Heartbeat - manage your Rails Apps from a web control panel": comment by Ben Askins

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 06:18:41 EST

This is cool. Any chance of supporting URLs sitting behind HTTP authentication?

"Heartbeat - manage your Rails Apps from a web control panel": comment by Ezra

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 01:58:05 EST

Very cool guys!

"Heartbeat - manage your Rails Apps from a web control panel" by derek

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 00:24:00 EST

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.