We just released a new beta version of our RubyGem.

It has new features, like the webbynode logs command that tails the Rails application logs without the need to SSH into your machine.

But we would like to highlight some features and changes that were triggered by a user’s criticism on Twitter:

bjeanes WTF WebbyNode initialisation adds db/schema.rb to my .gitignore forcing me to not check it in!?!? I think that’s a dealbreaker… 5 months, 1 week ago from Nambu

After this initial tweet, we started a back and forth discussion.

In the end, it was clear to us that the user’s arguments were valid. We asked the user to create a new issue for the problem in our issue tracker, which he did.

As a result of this discussion, we started some foundation work to enhance the Rapp engine.

Historically, we had a lot of schema.rb conflict problems, and our simple solution was to start ignoring it. However, the argument that clicked for us was that “webbynode git remotes are purely used for deploys and not for actual repo hosting”.

It was clear that the solution was not to ignore schema.rb, but instead always “force” our git pushes, avoiding conflicts altogether.

While we were at it, we also added another long-awaited feature: the ability to push different branches to your Webby.

Rapp now always pushes the current active branch, regardless of which branch that is. For example, if you are on the sandbox branch, when you push, the sandbox branch will be loaded on your Webby instead of silently pushing the master branch under the hood.

With all that, what we learned is that listening to users, regardless of the channel, is always important and can lead to key improvements to your product and, in consequence, to more satisfied users.

All these changes are available in Webbynode gem version 1.0.4.beta4 that can be installed by running:
[shell]$ [sudo] gem install –pre webbynode [/shell]

Here’s a summary of all changes and new features:

• New console command to remotely access Rails app console
• New logs command to tail Rails log
• New settings command to list all settings of the current app
• Skip database creation and migration with wn settings add skipdb true (specially useful for MongoDB apps)
• Always forces a push of the current branch
• Fixed a bug when .gitignore didn’t have a newline at the end of file

So this has been and will still remain our commitment: to listen to you. Please let us know if you run into any problems while testing this new version.

We just pushed a change that enables users to take full advantage of version 3.0.0 of Phusion Passanger that was just launched.

If you have a Webby with a ReadyStack or Rapp engine and you’re running a previous version of Passenger with nginx and REE, just run this command:

curl -L http://wbno.de/uppas | bash

And it will upgrade Phusion Passenger to the latest version. Apache users will have to update manually for the time being.

For Apache users:

gem install passenger

passenger-install-apache2-module

You may have to install additional packages, just follow the normal Passenger install instructions.

After the install is finished, the lines Passenger requires to load for apache are located in a file called passenger.conf in /etc/apache2/conf.d

Please make the needed changes to this file and run:

/etc/init.d/apache2 reload

And you should be running Passenger 3.

Documentation for the upgrade procedure for Ruby 1.9.2 and Nginx coming later this week.