I’ve mostly finished extracting Typo’s installer into its own Rails project and .gem. The installer makes it trivial to build an installable .gem for any Rails project, so the install process looks like this:

$ gem install my-project
$ my-project install /some/path

The installer source lives in Google Code. That includes a mailing list and bug tracker. I’ll upload my .gem to RubyForge later today, along with some documentation. For now, the rdoc is available.

Here’s what you’ll need to do to add the installer to your existing Rails app:

  1. Create a .gem that depends on rails-app-installer, rails, and all other .gems that you need to have installed.
  2. Add an executable entry to your gemspec. If your app is called my-app, then add executable = ['my-app'].
  3. Finally, create bin/my-app, using one of the examples in the rails-app-installer SVN tree as an example.

Here’s a short example bin/my-app:

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby

  require 'rubygems'
  require 'rails-installer'
  
  class AppInstaller < RailsInstaller
    application_name 'my_app'
    support_location 'my website'
    rails_version '1.1.4'
  end
  
  # Installer program
  directory = ARGV[1]
  
  app = AppInstaller.new(directory)
  app.message_proc = Proc.new do |msg|
    STDERR.puts " #{msg}"
  end
  app.execute_command(*ARGV)

That’s all that’s needed–as long as the installer gem is installed, this will give you a full installer that supports installs, upgrades, db backups and restores, and all of the other things that the Typo installer currently provides. Adding application-specific installer subcommands is easy. Here’s the sweep_cache implementation from Typo’s installer:

  class SweepCache < RailsInstaller::Command
    help "Sweep Typo's cache"
    
    def self.command(installer, *args)
      installer.sweep_cache
    end
  end

That’s all that’s needed to implement the typo sweep_cache /some/path installer command.

Update: The gem is out. gem install rails-app-installer.