Friday, February 22, 2008

Piston

If you haven't heard about it, Piston is a very nice gem that will help you manage your plugins. This is especially true if you have an svn:externals setup with your plugins.

Here's a quick step by step I recently did to get my Stage plugin into my latest project:

#Install the gem
sudo gem install piston -y

piston import http://stonean.googlecode.com/svn/stage/trunk vendor/plugins/stage

piston lock vendor/plugins/stage/

svn commit -m "started stage plugin management with piston"

Checkout the Piston site for more usage options.

François Beausoleil (author of Piston) pointed out that the "piston lock" step is not required. I should have noted this in my original post. Thanks for the notice François.

If you leave this out and run "piston update", all your plugins under piston control will be updated. Just be mindful of that issue.

2 comments:

François Beausoleil said...

You don't need to lock your plugin down, unless you do a blanket "piston update".

Andrew Stone said...

First off, thanks for such a great tool.

This is a good point, I just like to err on the side of caution just in case someone on the team mistakenly does the "piston update".