amoghe / rocketship

Rocketship

Rocketship helps you launch your software on a linux appliance (physical or virtual).

What is the motivation behind this project?

Companies that ship their product as physical or virtual appliances end up spending an large amount of time and resources building software to manage the state of the appliance and provide facilities that make the product usable. While this is necessary for the product to be stable and easily serviceable, it distracts from the focus of building the core IP that is going to provide value to the user. rocketship is an attempt to provide the common core functionality needed in order to ship linux based appliances, allowing you to focus on other things.

What is this core functionality, you ask? Typically, this includes services (outside the core business process) that help usability, serviceability and generally help keep the appliance operational. Some of these include:

• System metrics
• Crash reporting
• Easy (atomic) upgrades
• User login account management
• Command line interfaces (CLI)

rocketship intends to provide the platform on which you can ship your software without needing to develop all these peripheral pieces. You place your binary (or binaries, and accompanying scripts) in the workspace , and let rocketship build you an appliance image that you can use to build physical and virtual appliances.

How does rocketship do everything it claims to do?

See the wiki for detailed notes on the architecture of the system as well as the processes that

What does rocketship not handle for me?

Almost all appliances can be configured using a UI that is accessibly from a web browser. rocketship intentionally does NOT ship with any UI because that is a non-reusable component because every user of project will want to present their own interface and user experience depending on their business domain. Instead rocketship exposes a configuration managenemt API which can be invoked from an UI code.

How do I completely integrate with rocketship beyond just launching my process?

In order to provide a consistent UX, you'll want to integrate further by letting rocketship handle the configuration for your binary so that users can interact with all system confiration the same way. This involves adding APIs to handle configuration storage and adding command line tools so users can modify the configuration from the CLI.

How do I modify rocketship and/or contribute to it?

rocketship software is written using go(lang). In order to build the project, you need go to be installed (and $GOPATH to be set).

1. Clone this repo into your $GOPATH
2. Run ./bootstrap-dev.sh, to detect whether the prerequisite tools are present
3. Install any missing tools as advised by the output from bootstrap-dev.sh
4. Run rake -T to list all the build targets
5. Invoke the necessary build target