Video of Open Source Bridge's Configuration Management Panel The video recording of the Open Source Bridge conference's Configuration Management Panel has been posted. It features a discussion between the developers of AutomateIt, Puppet, Cfengine, Chef and bcfg2. Watch the video...

AutomateIt source code converted to Git and moved to GitHub The source code for AutomateIt has been converted to the Git distributed version control system and hosted at the GitHub source code sharing site. This switch will make it easier for contributors to track changes, create forks, and submit patches. The Download page has been updated with new instructions and paths.

AutomateIt powers Open Source Bridge conference servers, recipes published as open source Open Source Bridge is a community organized open source conference in Portland, Oregon starting June 17, 2009. Igal Koshevoy of Pragmaticraft, the company behind AutomateIt, has automated the conference's server setup and published the source code . The source includes a complete AutomateIt project, with a bootstrap to load the interpreter on the machine, generic "base" recipes that can be reused on other projects, custom recipes for this project, and documentation. ( Source code

David Brewer presents OSCON talk featuring AutomateIt David Brewer works at Second Story Interactive Studios where he develops websites and interactive exhibits for museums and other cultural institutions. He was an early adopter of AutomateIt and has made major contributions to it. He will be making a presentation at OSCON in Portland, Oregon with the title "Using Ubuntu, Virtualization, and Automation to Improve Your Web Development Workflow" at 11:35am, Friday, 07/25/2008. (Presentation details)

Pragmaticraft sponsors FOSCON Pragmaticraft, the company behind AutomateIt, is helping organize and sponsor the Portland Ruby Brigade's fourth annual FOSCON event: "a free, fun gathering of Ruby fans held during an evening of O'Reilly's OSCON conference with cool presentations, food, discussions, and a live coding competition." ( Event details ).

AutomateIt is alive and well AutomateIt is in daily use at numerous firms. Although it's been a while since the last update, all the key features planned for the 1.0 release are working well and no bugs have been uncovered in months. Upcoming plans include adding support for the FreeBSD package format and providing a more generalized way to specify external programs invoked by drivers, e.g., "ruby1.8" vs. "ruby".

Pragmaticraft sponsors Ruby and OSS Evening Social Pragmaticraft, the company behind AutomateIt, helped organize and sponsor the Portland Ruby Brigade's "Ruby and OSS Evening Social". The event featured Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby; members of Japanese, Oregon-based organizations that use and contribute to Ruby and open source; and over 50 members of the Portland Ruby Brigade ( details ).

AutomateIt manages packages with Perl's CPAN, PHP's PEAR and PECL, and others AutomateIt provides a common interface for installing, uninstalling and querying software packages. Version 0.71220 manages packages with: Debian/Ubuntu APT and DPKG, Fedora/CentOS/RedHat YUM and RPM, Gentoo Portage, Ruby Gem, Python Egg, PHP PEAR and PECL (thanks to David Brewer's driver), and now Perl's CPAN (thanks to Jesse Hallett's research).

AutomateIt resolves installation problems due to changes in third-party packages If you had trouble installing AutomateIt on a new system, please install AutomateIt 0.71219 or newer. AutomateIt relies on third-party libraries, but a few of these recently changed and broke the installer. The new AutomateIt release features workarounds for these issues.

AutomateIt online community opens its doors AutomateIt now has its own online community. It's a place for developers, users and evaluators to discuss AutomateIt, share best practices, request features, and report bugs at http://groups.google.com/group/automateit

AutomateIt can execute commands on groups of hosts AutomateIt 0.71103 provides an easier way to execute commands on groups of hosts using SSH. For example, you can list Rails processes running on all hosts in the rails_servers group with: aissh -p . rails_servers 'ps -ef | grep rails' . You can also continue to use the old approach of writing a shell loop over aitag if you need greater control.

AutomateIt provides basic support for all targeted OSes AutomateIt's compatibility has been extended. Version 0.71021 runs on all operating systems intended for the upcoming 1.0 release. AutomateIt supports 12 operating system and features 36 drivers. Effort is underway to complete the final ~12 drivers ( details ).

AutomateIt now supports the Rails 2.0 preview release AutomateIt has been updated to work with the new ActiveSupport library included with the next version of the Rails framework, and continues to work with existing versions. Please upgrade to AutomateIt version 0.71017 or later so you can use it with the latest ActiveSupport library.

AutomateIt presentation on Tuesday, October 2nd Topic: “Creating agile infrastructures with AutomateIt” (details)

Speaker: Igal Koshevoy, AutomateIt’s author

Audience: Technical managers, software engineers, system administrators

When: Tuesday, October 2nd, 7pm

Where: CubeSpace, 622 SE Grand Ave, Portland OR 97214 (directions)

AutomateIt is now easier to install The AutomateIt package is now on RubyForge, so you can install it and all its gem dependencies with a single, easy-to-type command

AutomateIt is now more user-friendly and easier to embed User-friendly error messages make it easier to fix problems in recipes and templates, these pinpoint and show the suspect code. You can now specify packages with a more natural manifest listing that allows free-form text and comments. Embedding the Interpreter got even simpler. And JRuby can now run most commands.

AutomateIt expands cross-platform support AutomateIt has been ported and tested on additional platforms. It now provides complete support for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, and RedHat. It also provides basic support for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Gentoo, and FreeBSD.