Comment by thecopy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thecopy | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed. This sentence especially makes me think this is too much magic:

>Nanobox detects your app type and automatically configures the environment and installs everything your app needs to run

and

>Each Engine sniffs the code looking for a positive match to determine which language / framework your app is written in

and lastly:

>The matched Engine generates a Boxfile defining the services your app needs to run and how each should be configured

This sound quite fragile imo. No specs or configuration, it just guesses what all my deps are, and how to configure redis,mysql, and "other data-specific services" etc.

So an enourmous abstraction over everything except my source code with no configuration and a promise to "take care of everything" and forcing me to use their pipeline. Hm...

You're right, not every scenario can be handled automatically. For that reason, the Boxfile is king: https://docs.nanobox.io/getting-started/boxfile/

>> Nanobox detects your app type and automatically configures the environment and installs everything your app needs to run

Yeah, that's gonna be a bit hard for it to do with our Clojure web app. Well, maybe. If it knows to install openjdk-7 and nginx because it sees a project.clj, then perhaps it really is as smart as it thinks it is.

.. or immutant or jetty or .... Buildinng a simulated production environment on the dev machine is hard because in production, there are (in most cases) special settings, special servers, special configurations, special files on special places, ... It is rarely out of the box configured service stacks.

Auto-detections is based on the existing library of engines, which is only in its infancy right now. Engines have what's called a "sniff" script. This is a bash script written by the engine developer that searches the codebase for uniquely identifying files or content within files. Auto-detection won't work for every app, but it should help to get the majority of apps up and running quickly. For very custom apps, anybody can develop and publish their own engine. Information about engines is in the nanobox docs: https://docs.nanobox.io/engines/

Note: this is exactly how buildpack detection on heroku - and anything that uses buildstep/herokuish for PaaS solutions - work.

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