StompBox : A Deployer for TorqueBox

StompBox is a simple Sinatra app that can be used to manage deployments on TorqueBox by accepting post-commit POST-backs from GitHub. It provides a user interface for managing one-click deployment and undeployment of your github repositories to TorqueBox for specific branches and commit points.

StompBox is useful for testing and development environments where your code is changing frequently and you want to quickly deploy working branches and staging instances. It integrates with your GitHub repositories to enable extremely quick and simple app deployment of any Rack-based application. And it does all this on top of the industrial-strength TorqueBox platform, automatically providing your application with enterprise-level functionality such as messaging, scheduling, tasks, clustering and more.

Installing StompBox is painless.

If you don't already have TorqueBox installed, you should do that first. Head on over to the TorqueBox web site and follow the detailed instructions for downloading, installing, configuring and running TorqueBox. Don't worry - it's easy. Or, if you want to just take us out for a quick spin around the block and kick the tires, use our TorqueBox Appliance (CR1 image id: ami-a8ca36c1).

StompBox hasn't been tested on Windows and may not work in that environment. However, if you are running a Unix-y system such as Fedora or Mac OSX, then you should be fine.

StompBox uses PostgreSQL for persistent storage. See the deployment instructions below for additional details.

StompBox is installed as a Ruby Gem:

$ jruby -S gem install torquebox-stompbox --pre

The --pre flag is required until we have an official 1.0 release.

Once you've installed the gem, you can deploy it. Make sure you have $TORQUEBOX_HOME set and issue the following command:

$ jruby -S stompbox deploy --setup-db --auto-migrate --secure=username:password

This will install StompBox in $TORQUEBOX_HOME/apps, create and initialize the database, and turn on JAAS authentication for StompBox with the username and password supplied. You'll need to run this command as a user that has database create privileges in order for all of that setup magic to work correctly.

Configuration options are found in $TORQUEBOX_HOME/apps/torquebox-stompbox-knob.yml. Here are some things you'll want to pay attention to.

• DATABASE_URL Provide a URI for connecting to your database. By convention, StompBox uses a database called "stompbox", but you can change this to whatever you want as long as it is supported by DataMapper. Be sure the user specified in the connection URI has appropriate privileges for executing DDL on your database. When the app starts for the first time, the tables will be created and it will fail if your user doesn't have the proper permissions.

• AUTO_MIGRATE The first time you run StompBox, you'll want to have this on so that your database is automagically created. After that, it's most efficient to just unset this option by commenting it out.

• DEPLOYMENTS When you deploy an application using StompBox, it clones the git repository into this directory. Make sure that your TorqueBox instance is running as a user with enough privileges to write to this directory.

• REQUIRE_AUTHENTICATION To turn authentication on, set this to any non-nil value. StompBox uses the built-in JAAS authentication provided by TorqueBox and JBossAS. See the Authentication section below for more information.

• API_KEY This should be set to something unguessable like an SHA1 hash. If you deploy as a gem a random, 40 character string is generated for you. If you install manually, you'll want to generate your own key. You can generate these any number of ways.

Here's one one way to generate a key.

$ echo "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York" | openssl sha1

(stdin)= e4ba3556d1d059e2eadca9488b093d6685657e00

StompBox uses the built-in JAAS authentication provided by JBoss and exposed via TorqueBox. If this is a development system (it probably should be), the simplest way to set usernames and passwords is to use the builtin rake task.

$ rake torquebox:auth:adduser username:password

Be sure to set REQUIRE_AUTHENTICATION in config/torquebox.yml as well. Voilá, authentication is enabled.

TorqueBox (and subsequently StompBox) can also authenticate with any other realm you have configured in your JBossAS. If you have configured JAAS settings in your TorqueBox instance, you may authenticate against them by supplying the authentication realm in config/torquebox.yml as shown.

auth:
  default:
    domain: my-configured-jaas-realm

Start by telling StompBox what repositories and branches you want to track. Once you've got everything configured and deployed, you can start by telling StompBox what repositories and branches you want to track. Then, from GitHub, browse to the repository admin screen for one of the repositories you specified in config/stompbox.yml. Select "Service Hooks" -> "Post Receive URLs" and enter your StompBox URL plus your api_key (you configured it didn't you?). It should look something like this.

http://mydomain.com/stompbox/push/3821A95D456134214FAD6FA91A2BAFE574D47151

After you save your settings, testing the service hook should send a POST request to your StompBox. Play around.

You should not use it in a production environment. It is currently used for research, development and testing only.

This software is distributed under an MIT software license.