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Radiant CMS in 5 Minutes Or Less

Radiant is an excellent Rails-based Content Management System (CMS). It was created by John W. Long and Sean Cribbs, and has been around for a couple of years, growing steadily in popularity. With the recent addition of taps and gem manifests, it’s super-easy to get this lightweight CMS up and running on Heroku.

Start by installing the latest radiant gem on your local box:

$ sudo gem install radiant

Now use the radiant command-line tool to set up your Radiant CMS locally. We’ll use SQLite as the local database:

$ radiant –database sqlite mycms
$ cd mycms
$ rake …

Deployment That Just Works

Last week I talked a bit about why instant deployment matters. A few people have since commented that it’s not instant deployment that matters to them, but rather deployment that just works every time.

Of course, what we’re really talking about is both. Part of achieving deployment that just works is decreasing complexity and removing steps – each a point of possible failure. We are working toward deployment that’s both instant and completely reliable, because we think those things are tightly linked.

We’ve rolled out some new content today explaining more about how our platform works, including some …

Why Instant Deployment Matters

How much better are two steps than three? Does it matter if something takes five minutes instead of twenty? When it comes to software deployment and provisioning, does instant really matter?

Recently, I was ranting on this subject to a user who had the misfortune of asking me about it in person.

“Truly instant provisioning and deployment is the ultimate goal,” I said. “10 seconds isn’t good enough. We have to –”,

“Look,” he interrupted, “I love what you guys are doing and don’t want you to stop, but why are you so obsessed with this?”

My immediate answer: because …

The Future of Deployment

Application deployment is changing. In relatively short order I’ve gone from buying hardware, to monthly hosting, to metered CPU time, and from building my open-source software manually, to package managers, to fancy config tools and recipes to pre-build whole machine images. What’s next?

The Old Way

I can deploy Rails apps in a traditional hosting environment pretty quickly. For a small app, I might make a new unix user and database on a personal Slicehost slice and do a quick code checkout. After setting up a few permissions and twiddling my Nginx config, in a matter of fifteen minutes or …

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