Hey everyone -
I've just released Moonshine, a Rails plugin for automated deployment and configuration management that includes complete configuration of an opinionated Rails stack: Passenger, Rails, and MySQL on Ubuntu.
Moonshine gives Rails plugin and app developers a simple way to package automation *with* their code. Any rails plugin can include a simple moonshine plugin to install it's required libraries, services, and configuration. Apps can include a complete manifest to handle server setup instead of writing custom installers, complicated Cap tasks, or relying on external automation infrastructure.
Moonshine also promotes DRY deployment: using gem.config for gem dependencies, mapping gems to native packages, database.yml for database setup, ERB configuration file templates, and refactoring variables from deploy.rb to a common config file.
I blogged about this over at the Rails Machine blog:
http://blog.railsmachine.com/articles/2009/03/18/moonshine-what-burns-blue-makes-your-blues-go-away/
The code and RDocs are hosted at GitHub:
http://railsmachine.github.com/moonshine/
If Puppet, Chef, Sprinkle, or Deprec are your kind of thing, you've gotta check out Moonshine.
Cheers -
Jesse