Cany

Cany is a toolkit to create easily distribution packages from your (ruby) application. The goal is to reduce the packaging work to managing the application meta data (specification).

The goal is to support all (common) package manager - all from the some specification, although at the moment is only dpkg implemented.

The difference to other packaging tools is that cany uses as much tools as possible to build packages in the recommended way.

Warning: The gem has successfully built packages. But there are known limitations or problems. We collecting knowledge with the current usage and appreciate your feedback. With the 1.0 we will start with semantic visioning. Until then every updates tries to be as much compatible as possible but the more important goal is to create a better architecture and design -- so be careful when updating this gem.

Installation

Cany is a rubygem, it needs ruby >=1.9.3 to work. It is design to be lightweight, therefore a:

$ gem install cany

is enough to install and use it. But you can add is also to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'cany'

And then execute:

$ bundle

To let bundle install it for you.

Write a Specification for your Application

Create a file <your application name>.canspec inside your application folder:

Cany::Specification.new do
  name 'example-application' # This is used as package name - please you only ASCII letters, - and literals.
  version '0.1' # Your application's version
  description 'This example application is used to have a application for that this README can describe how it is packaged with cany' # A short description for you application. Should not longer than a few paragraphs
  maintainer_name 'Hans Otto' # The person/organisation maintaining the package
  maintainer_email '[email protected]' # A eMail address to contact the maintainer
  website 'http://example.org/cany' # A website to get more information about the application
  licence 'MIT' # Your Licence

  # Use common build tasks to build your application - describing how your application needs to be build
  # The ordering is important, see the recipes documentation for more information about the recipes itself and there recommended ordering
  use :bundler
  use :rails
end

Recipes

Cany uses different recipes to share different packaging tasks above multiple applications.

Bundler

All common applications need a bunch of gems. Bundle is the common tool to manage these gems. Because for most of the gems there exists no packages, we decide that the best approach is to ship the installed gems with the application.

This recipe is designed to use as first one. The installs bundler and uses the Gemfile.lock to install the referenced gems to vendor/bundle.

Rails

This recipe is used to install a ruby on rails application. The recipes installs the different files/directories.

Thin

This recipe configures thin and install an init script to launch the application. It assumes that thin is listed in your Gemfile.

Own Adjustments

There are applications were the known recipes are not sufficient to build it. You can define blocks inside the canspec that are runs like normal recipes and allow you to do specific tasks.

The following example installs an additional folder (of an Ruby on Rails applications):

Cany::Sepcification.new do
  # meta data and recipe loading
  binary do
    install 'additional_subdir', "/usr/share/#{spec.name}"
  end
end

Take a look at the Recipe class for helper you can use.

Use Your Specification to Create Packages

dpkg

To create dpkg packages (used by debian and its derivatives) run from your application directory with your canspec:

$ cany dpkg-create

It creates a debian subdirectory containing all needed files/information to build a dpkg package in the debian way. To create the package itself cany relies on the debian packaging tools. The build your package without signing the created files with GPG run

$ dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

Afterwards you should have *.deb package in the directory containing your application directory.

Contributing

If you have problems create an issue. Feedback is also welcome - you can write me on email or contact me on freenode (@mswart).

If you have a change which should be included into cany:

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request