NW Rug - Capistrano Talks

I recently headed up to the August NWRug in Manchester, firstly because it’s been a while since I’ve seen Will Jessop, the organiser (and more importantly a mate) and secondly because I was interested in Capistrano.

While we use puppet at work for the more strategic stuff, such as ensuring machines start off with a well-defined configuration, I’ve been in need of something to perform sets of tasks against defined groups of servers. While I’ve been using the time honoured pattern of wrapping our inventory commands in ssh loops I’ve started to have more complex needs. While we’re not using Ruby or Rails Cap looks like it should be able to fulfil a lot of my need for immediate action (something that puppet isn’t good at).

While the first talk of the evening was about the basics of Cap the second was much more interesting to me. It was an advanced talk given by (I think) the current maintainer. He did an excellent job of explaining some of the less common features and how they related to the Unix philosophy - such as streams and pipes. The speaker obviously knew his stuff and it’s given me the push I need to hopefully spend some time in the future looking at the software. If his slides go up they are well worth a read.

The group were a friendly bunch, the venue was nice and the talks educational. If it wasn’t for the train cost and the time spent travelling I’d be more than willing to attend more of their meetings.