GitHub Reflog v1.3.21

Welcome to the first edition of The GitHub Reflog. This is a new weekly installment chronicling awesome GitHub repos, brought to you by Kenneth Reitz, one of the classy gentlemen behind The Changelog and a ton of open source projects.

Featured Repo of the Week

devstructure/blueprint

This is one of the coolest projects I’ve seen in a long time.

Simply put, Blueprint reverse engineers servers. It scans your system, records installed packages from various managers (aptitude, ruby’s gem, python’s pip, etc), archives software built from source, and records configuration file changes. It then packages your entire server configuration into a bootstrap.sh file with an attached archive. You can take that bootstrap package and run it anywhere to replicate your server setup.

Then, Blueprint takes it to the next level: it generates full recipes/manifests for both Chef and Puppet with the blueprint-create {-C | -P} command.

Of course, QA is required for the resulting recipes, but it’s a definitely a great first step for streamlining your existing systems.

Bon appétit!

Awesome Repo of the Week

drbrain/meme

I CAN HAS MEME? Meme is an awesome Ruby gem for generating memegenerator.net images from the command line. It features SPARTA, PHILOSORAPTOR, KEANU, TROLLFACE, and many more. The resulting pull requests are definitely worth looking at.

$ meme US_POINT 'I want you' 'to merge this'

Remarkable Repos

• taitems/Aristo-jQuery-UI-Theme:
  This is not a new project, but it received a lot of attention this week. Aristo is a beautiful theme for jQuery UI that emulates the elegant style of the Cappuccino JavaScript framework. jQuery UI has a bad reputation for having less-than-desirable themes available for its widgets. Aristo strives to fix that.
• brainsik/virtualenv-burrito:
  This project simplifies the virtualenv/wrapper setup in your Python development environment. Sprinters at last week’s PyCon 2011 had to spend a large amount of time setting up their environments before they could contribute. This project aims to remove that overhead.
• maccman/ichabod: This project lets you run headless WebKit JavaScript tests from the command line. It currently offers Jasmine and QUnit testing support. It also gives you an interactive JavaScript console that has access to the Ruby stack.

Promising Repos

• twitter/commons:
  Twitter’s internal common libraries for the JVM. Readme and build instructions haven’t been written yet, but this looks like an extensive library suite. Everything from a memcached interface to an argument parser is included. Check out the documentation to learn more.
• extend/cowboy:
  This “Small, fast, modular HTTP server” is implemented 100% in Erlang. It’s an ambitious project that’s still in the early development stage. Contributors are welcome!

Feedback is appreciated! Send any questions, suggestions, and anonymous tips to reflog@kennethreitz.com.

For more open source news, check out The Changelog and github/explore.

Written by

Kenneth Reitz

@kennethreitz