Till's blog

I'm a big fan of capistrano for my deployment and generally also prefer the command line (vs. nifty web interfaces).

Recently, I realized that it would be better to give up some responsibility to others on a project and it seems the easiest in terms of capistrano is webistrano — by the Berlin-based Peritor.

Gimme a port!

Because FreeBSD is and always will be my favorite operating system, I created a small port for webistrano on FreeBSD. The idea of a port is to have a command to install and remove software, generally, to keep your software installations manageable.

The 1.0 of my webistrano port is already on Github.

Usage

All required steps are listed in the README on Github, but in case you don't have ports on your FreeBSD, please follow these steps (assuming a more or less recent install, FreeBSD 6+):

• Get a port tree and install it to /usr/ports: portsnap fetch extract
• Install GIT: cd /usr/ports/devel/git && make install distclean
• Get the webistrano port:
  • cd (change to your home directory)
  • git clone git://github.com/till/webistrano-freebsd.git
  • cd webistrano-freebsd
  • ...

In case you want to skip on git, just download the webistrano-freebsd tar-ball from github:

• http://github.com/till/webistrano-freebsd/tarball/1.0

What's next?

I've got a small TODO (see README) and want to get that done ASAP, and send in a PR. I'd appreciate some feedback, if you got any.

UPDATE: #136108

Thanks to Wesley, we recently managed to update CouchDB's FreeBSD port to the official 0.9.0 release.

My current TODO for the port includes:

• a super-cool rc-script (currently, there is none)
• automatic user setup/creation (couchdb)
• patching of the install/source to use BSD-style directories for the database (e.g. /var/db/couchdb).

In regard to the the rc-script, I continued on a work in progress and committed an idea on Github. This work in process (couchdb) works out of the box. Just download the file, put it in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/, chmod +x couchdb and done. I also updated the CouchDB wiki page explaining how CouchDB on FreeBSD is setup (e.g. the options of the rc-script) and updated the instructions on user creation — something that I plan to roll into the couchdb port ASAP.

But before I continue on the port, I'd like to ask for feedback from people (Probably, you!) who use CouchDB on FreeBSD. For example, are you happy with the current options, or do you need a different set, etc.. If this work in progress is what you need, then that's valuable feedback as well.

Thanks!