I'm happy to announce the release of Webistrano - a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments.
Webistrano is an internal application that I developed at Peritor for the easy handling of Capistrano deployments. I often had situations where our designer updated some images and wanted to update/deploy our Rails project. Capistrano offers a nice command line interface for doing this but this is not the right tool for a designer, especially if you have a complicated multi-stage environment with production, staging and test settings.
Further we wanted to be able to keep track of who deployed what when to which servers.
This is where Webistrano enters the stage.
Webistrano is a Ruby on Rails application that manages projects with their different stages (like production or testing) and leverages Capistrano to handle the deployment part. This way it is very easy to handle multi-stage and multi-client situations and keep an eye on all deployments. It further includes a simple email alerting system so that you get pinged if somebody deploys to the production servers.
We are using Webistrano for quite some time now and it has proven stable for our needs. I am releasing it under the BSD license. The Subversion repository is located at Rubyforge.
On the project page you can find two screencasts that show you how to get Webistrano running and explain some advanced concepts.
More information can be found here:
http://blog.innerewut.de/webistrano/
There is also an intro screencast:
http://blog.innerewut.de/files/webistrano/screencasts/webistrano.mov
I presented Webistrano last month at the Berlin Ruby User Group (then under the name 'Webcap') and the feedback was quite positive. I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions.
Jonathan