Questions about Heaven

[andycox]

I've read the related issues here and other mentions on the Web but, like so many in the world, I still have unanswered questions about Heaven.

I know it's not a high priority, but has there been any activity on open-sourcing the core Heaven gem?

When you open source something previously used as in internal tool like Heaven, Hubot, Boxen, etc., how do you manage and hook in the parts that need to stay internal?

How does Heaven create Capistrano recipes on the fly? Do you have a baseline of static recipes for each app and then inject and/or config the dynamic parts? Is it template-based or full-on Ruby?

According to #38, the recipes to deploy each application are maintained as part of the Heaven code base rather than each app. Is Heaven smart about an application's environment stuff (e.g., can it automagically determine how many fe servers there are in the github.com production environment) or does it need to be updated manually every time an application's production environment changes?

I saw these examples of a Heaven CLI described a few years ago by @atmos:

$ heaven -a github -e production

$ heaven -a github -e production -h fe -b mybranch

Assuming that's not just a notional CLI, does the HTTP API do its thing by literally shelling out to or posix-spawning the CLI (or perhaps use Capistrano::CLI), or does it completely avoid the CLI?

Would the corresponding API call for the second example above conceptually be something like a POST to /github/production?hosts=fe&branch=mybranch?

Finally, any idea how Heaven got its name? I find naming stuff fascinating, especially since it's one of the two hard things.

I know a tool like this evolves over time and decisions that work for your organization don't always make sense for everyone, but it's often better to stand on the shoulders of giants than to reinvent the wheel. Thanks to you and the other GitHubbers for openly discussing how y'all work.

[holman]

gonna pray real hard and see if we can't conjure up an @atmos to answer these 🙏 🤘

[atmos]

@andycox I'll try to get around to writing this up later today. I wrote a lengthy reply on friday and my computer crashed. 💀

[andycox]

Another question after seeing this blog post about deploying: is the knowledge of whether a particular application is "locked" for deployment maintained in Heaven?

[atmos]

https://gist.github.com/atmos/6631554

[jpalumickas]

Awesome answer @atmos 👍