RailsFrame

   A Deployment and Virtualization Framework

(Most of this is still speculative.  The Angelbox project is building
toward it).

RailsFrame is an attempt to bring the magic of modern virtualization
and machine configuration to simple Rails apps with minimal fuss and
without compromising how easy it is to deploy your application.

RailsFrame is closely based on Vagrant, a library to create a small
virtualized machine for your app and get things running on it.

Unfortunately, Vagrant is pretty agnostic about what *kind* of app
you're running.  So you need to add a provisioning system (in this
case, Chef) to configure the machine properly with a web server and
whatnot for your Rails app.  In many cases, you'll have more specific
requirements as well -- a Juggernaut app will require Redis and
Node.js, for instance.

RailsFrame is a good-to-go framework (a.k.a. opinionated and
batteries-included) that installs Rails and a selection of nicely
tuned support components (NginX, Passenger, MySQL, BluePill and so
on).  It also makes a number of similar components available in case
you wish to use them, like the aforementioned Redis and Node.js.

RailsFrame consists of a number of components in simultaneous
development.  Here, look:

        --------------------------------------
        Rails App | Sinatra app | Frame App
        ---------------------------------------
                   Vagrant/Chef
        ---------------------------------------
          Angelbox - standard Rails cookbooks
        ---------------------------------------

Note that you can use standard Rails and Sinatra apps, or more other
things, with a bit of work and the right cookbooks.  However,
RailsFrame is designed to be a great little Rails box, and so those
are the baked-right-in components that you can easily specify.

You can customize your VagrantFile and Chef cookbooks to support your
various Rails and other apps.  Anything with a Gemfile is even easier
to support - RailsFrame will install all the gems, naturally.  But the
real power is when you create a RailsFrame-specific app.

A RailsFrame app is essentially an app using a custom Rails
distribution (thanks to Tom Enebo for the terminology!).  Serious
developers are already using RSpec, Cucumber, Factory_Girl,
Database_Cleaner, Decent_Exposure, HAML, SASS and many other standard
gems.  You can copy your Gemfile every time, mess with the directory
structure, add a few config files, fix up your scaffolds (if you use
them) and so on.  Or you can use a RailsFrame app, which is already
nicely set up with all of these.  Of course, it's a Rails 3 app, so you
can change back (or to something new) any time you want.

A RailsFrame app *also* sports a Cookbooks directory.  So if you're
using Juggernaut, you can reference the Redis and Node.js cookbooks
directly rather than having to add them to your root Vagrantfile.
Just include the app, and you get all the dependencies.  It's the only
way to develop!

Once all this is working well (yay, pre-alpha projects), it'll be time
to start adding hooks for proper deployment, via chef server.  Naturally
your cookbooks will already work just fine for this.