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Comment by jaytaylor | Hacker News Reader

You may be interested in checking out ShipBuilder - it is an open-source Heroku-clone PaaS.

ShipBuilder is written in Go, and uses Git, LXC and HAProxy to deliver a complete solution for application platform-as-a-service.

http://shipbuilder.io

https://github.com/sendhub/shipbuilder

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Your documentation seems limited to basic functions, with nothing explaining really what this does, or why I would need it. I've just spent like 20 minutes looking all over it and I have no idea what to do with it.

Thanks for your feedback, this kind in particular is very helpful and valuable.

We have a video explanation and walk-through of shipbuilder in the works which should help communicate more clearly about what ShipBuilder is and what it can do for you.

I have a few additional questions if you wouldn't mind helping me improve this aspect of Shipbuilder:

    1. Have you used Heroku before?

    2. Are you confused about the purpose of ShipBuilder?
    (i.e. "what does Shipbuilder do?")

    3. Are you confused about how to setup the ShipBuilder
    server/nodes/load-balancer?

    4. Are you confused about how the client works?

Finally, please feel free to contact me personally; I'd love the opportunity to answer questions or help you (or anyone) get started with ShipBuilder.

contact info: #shipbuilder on irc.freenode.net or jay [at) jaytaylor do.t com

Look at how easy heroku makes your first few steps[1]. I'd advise doing something similar but with, for example, instructions for setting up a quick shipbuilder server on amazon ec2 or the like. Bonus: it will show you where the pain points are for shipbuilder at the moment, because you'll have to write too many small gotchas&workarounds into the tutorial!

[1] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/git

Thanks for pointing this out minikomi, I will have to put together an EC2 quickstart guide. I am thinking of a more succinct form of what is currently the server install documentation [1].

[1] https://github.com/Sendhub/shipbuilder/blob/master/SERVER.md...

I think the main question that would help me would be "Why do I need Shipbuilder?" with different examples of when I would need it, how it compares to other tools, what it was designed to accomplish, all the system and network dependencies, and a breakdown of each individual component and how it works with other components. Mainly I want to be able to have an image in my head of how it fits into my network/system, what it might replace, or how I can take advantage of it.

How does ShipBuilder compare to other open-source PaaSes like http://www.cloudfoundry.com ? CloudFoundry's pretty far from production-ready at this point, but it does have the huge advantage of supporting existing Heroku buildpacks.

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