Announcement: Web Based Capistrano & CI Now Available!

[Lee Hambley]

Dear Capistrano Groupies!

Having maintained Capistrano for eight years, and always sought to find a balance between the immense popularity of Capistrano, and the time I devote to open source, my team and I are pleased to announce our new product, Harrow.io, a web-based host for Capistrano, and general automation & collaboration platform.

We have been asked throughout the years for a "web based" version of Capistrano, and indeed we set out to build one to make open source part of our company culture, and give both you, individually and Capistrano as a project and the community the time and dedication it deserves by founding a company devoted to FOSS.

In the course of building our "web based Capistrano" we recognised that in fact, there's no reason to restrict ourselves Capistrano, and that we had accidentally built an awesome new kind of CI, one where you can define, and share any tasks, or house keeping scripts with colleagues without limitation.

We built the prototype of Harrow before Docker was a thing, and Docker's arrival on the scene made us question if "traditional" deployment, as with Capistrano had a future, but as many of you will cry Capistrano is not just about deployment! 

With SSHKit, and the large rewrite we did with v3, Capistrano is now a much more general house-keeping and dev ops tool, with an ever accelerating rate of downloads and a thriving plugin ecosystem. We rebuilt Harrow in such a way that we fully support Docker, as a host, and to build Docker images, with no restriction on sudo rights.

Harrow is free for everyone to try for 30 days, available hosted in the cloud, and to run on your own hardware via a VM, or a private cloud installation upon request.

We are often asked how Harrow compares to Jenkins, Travis and Circle-CI since we sincerely carry the "CI" label but you'll see that one you try Harrow that the comparison is only skin deep, we are a true automation and collaboration platform, whereas "tests" in the traditional sense of CI are just one thing you might want to automate for convenience and speed. Harrow is built for tests, builds, deployments, sanity checks, "cron" type jobs, and anything in between.

Please, ping me, ask the list, and shout about us. If you think this is a great idea, or a horrible mess, all feedback is good, and we've had good feedback from our Alpha testers, it's early days, and we can only improve from here.

Thanks for reading, this will be the last explicit unsolicited announcement about Harrow in this group! 

Try it now, free for at least a month!

Yours, Lee Hambley & team!