Talk to god

Posted by Tim Brys on Feb 06, 2009

If you have ever used god, you know it's a wonderful application to monitor your processes and to keep them going.

The sole inconvenience of god is the way it's controlled while running. You often have to log in to your server and write some commands on the command line to simply restart a task or check the logs. "User friendly" isn't the first thing that comes to mind. We can do better.

Inspired by a video we saw on peepcode, we wrote some ruby code that allows you to interact with your applications via a jabber bot. This bot is plugged straight into the application you wish to interface with. In the case of god, we can go beyond the level of control the command line gives you and use the god ruby code itself. Also, the bot will notify the users he's chatting with of any events the application wishes to send.

From this point on, the only limit is your imagination: use the bot simply to create new objects and be alerted of errors, or go pro and write ruby code that is evaluated within the context of your application.

Example:

Say 'yo' to the bot to subscribe to gods notifications

Ask 'cava?' to check if god is running and registered with the bot
Pass 'status' to get the status of gods tasks

'startall locals1' to start up tasks in group locals1
god notifies us of starting of tasks

'terminate' to stop god completely
'init' to start god again

god notifies us again of started tasks

The sample code will be published to our github repository next week.