Remember that secret project? Introducing…

We cryptically announced a private beta recently, and now we’re ready to spill the beans!

As you know, we have a great API (if we say so ourselves) but it isn’t terribly practical for performing routine operations.

So we created a handy command line tool that lets you better interact with the Scalr API and deploy code more easily.

Um, so what?

You can do more cool stuff. Let the possibilities begin:

1. Create a dev server farm, and let your developers tie it to their code repository. They push code to the repo from the command line using git or svn, then from the repo to the servers using the new tool.

2. Same as above, but add some continuous integration into the mix with Jenkins. Here’s what your workflow would look like:

a. Create a fork or a new branch in repository, checkout code from it
b. Code a new feature
c. Merge new code in your fork or branch
d. Use our new tools to push code from your fork or branch to your dev server farm
e. Use Jenkins to run tests
f. Repeat steps b.-e. until tests pass
g. Commit to main branch

3. Go totally hardcore and deploy directly to production systems. If things break and tests don’t pass, keep pushing new code quickly until they do. Alternatively, roll back to a previous revision just as easily.

4. Practice your bash-fu and use the command line tools from inside your instances to retrieve information about your other farms, like getting the IP addresses for all your web servers so you can configure your varnish reverse proxy with them.

5. Pipe grep with logs obtained with the tool to quickly find some data.

6. Stuff we haven’t thought of.

This lacks polish, but it’s a start.

We’d like to better integrate code repos to Apache vhosts and DNS to avoid tying code in a repo to a directory. Instead, you could point it to a domain and the vhosts and directory are taken care of. For example, tying repo X to (sub)domain beta.example.com, creates a vhost for beta.example.com on all web servers in farm Y.

Surely your mind races with the endless possibilities of such a powerful tool, so we’ll finish off with a single link to help you get started.

Installation and Getting Started

We hope you enjoy this great new tool.

Cheers,
The Scalr Command-line Team