Gift – Git and FTP, the easy way

We recently adopted Ruby on Rails as our primary web application framework of choice. The marriage of Rails, Git and Heroku made for a carefree development, deployment and management strategy. Unfortunately, the reality is that we’re not always able to use our favourite technologies. And more often than not often a client will have existing hosting arrangements that simply cannot (easily) support a Rails setup, or maybe we’re just doing a simple Wordpress blog. Regardless – we wanted to have that same ease of deployment; a way to manage development in the style to which we have become accustomed.

So we made Gift.

Install the gem:

	gem install gift

Initialise your FTP server:

	gift wrap ftp://username:password@127.0.0.1:21

Push your commits:

	gift deliver

This is still very, very early days for Gift. One could state that it “works”, but that may imply that it is “finished”; we’re almost there though.

Just be aware that if you decide to try Gift, it may not behave as you expect (or at all).