There’s now not one, not two, but THREE different ways to make sure that Beanstalk is just a click away in your Mac Menubar.
Newest: FeedsApp gives you growl notifications & clickable activity
The newest option is FeedsApp. This app grabs all activity information, including commits & deployments you have access to, and puts it in a menubar list. Every update comes with optional Growl notifications, flyout menu with more details, and you can even click on the update to jump straight to the changeset or deployment in Beanstalk in your web browser.
FeedsApp also supports a bunch of other great apps, too!
It’s normally $4.99 in the Mac App store, but it’s on sale to celebrate the new integration with Beanstalk for $2.99. Grab a copy and try it out!
Magic Bean lets you Create, Trigger, and Monitor Deployents
We’ve written about Magic Bean a few times before, as it’s one of the most popular ways to use Beanstalk on your iOS device. Andy’s created a desktop version as well, focused around our simple code deployments engine.
Just go to your Magic Bean in your menubar, browse to your environment, and set up a new deployment. Magic Bean will even let you know when the deployment has completed with a Growl notification.
Magic Bean is $9.99 in the Mac App Store. Get deploying!
Create a Menubar Browser with Fluid
Fluid is a cool tool that lets you create “single site browsers”, custom tailored for your favorite webapps. One of it’s features is the ability to let a single-site browser live in the menubar!
Luckily, Beanstalk has a pretty hot responsive design, which resizes navigation and other UI elements for mobile screens. If you create a menubar browser for Beanstalk and resize the screen appropriately, you’ll get Beanstalk’s mobile view automatically. Fluid can save these settings for the next time you start it up. It’s like having the whole Beanstalk webapp in your menubar, anytime you want it.
Thanks to their generous creators, we’ve got some free codes for FeedsApp and Magic Bean for Mac. All you need to do is tweet about them for a chance to win!
Over 3 and a half years ago we launched the first version of our automatic FTP deployment tool. It’s since grown to be one of the most popular features in Beanstalk. Across all of our repositories, our customers have configured 1 deployment environment for every 4 repos. Amazing!
Today, we’re excited to announce the newest version of Beanstalk Deployments. We’re confident that this is the easiest, fastest, and most powerful version yet.
What are Beanstalk deployments?
If you’ve never used Beanstalk deployments, let’s catch you up. Our deployment tools allow you to instantly deploy your sites and applications to your web servers in one step. You can manually or automatically deploy code hosted in Beanstalk to your development, staging, and production environments over FTP, sftp and now using SSH commands.
What’s new?
If you already use Beanstalk deployments, you will love the new features.
More intuitive workflow and design
The interface got a big update. It’s now easier to view the status of each environment along with the current version and what was recently deployed. Access to editing and updating servers and environments is faster to navigate to as well.
Execute SSH commands directly on your servers
Starting today, Beanstalk deployments are more powerful and flexible than ever with SSH deployments. Previously you could only upload files and trigger web hooks. With SSH deployments you can now run a set of commands or pre-written scripts directly on one or many servers at the same time. For instance, if you use capistrano, you can have deployments execute the command “cap production deploy” just by making a commit!
Automatic release notes
The real power of deployments tools is improving communication. Keeping your team informed on what was deployed and when avoids mistakes and keeps your development process moving forward. With our new release notes, any team member can quickly see what was included in the latest deployments, even tickets associated with the deployment if you integrate with Lighthouse, FogBugz or Sifter.
Ability to cancel a deployment
For some of you, this has been a long time feature request. You can now cancel a deployment that is in progress if something is wrong, allowing you to quickly recover if you deployed the wrong revision or code.
Deployment email notifications
Another popular feature request, deployment email notifications allow each person to optionally receive a beautifully designed HTML notification on deployments that succeed or fail. Each notification includes full release notes on who initiated the deployment, what was deployed and the status of the deployment.
Try Beanstalk Deployments Today
This is just a taste of what’s included in our latest release. You can review our full changelog to see everything, or try out the new Beanstalk Deployments right now!
Beanstalk Deployments is included completely free in every Beanstalk account, so you can get started with these new tools right away.
Happy new year from the entire team at Beanstalk! We’re excited about what we have in store for 2012, and we’re starting the year off with a couple of improvements to some of our workflow tools. You can review our entire changelog as always, but here are some of the highlights.
Campfire Integrations for Git
One of Beanstalk’s integrations allows you to publish commits and pushes to your Campfire chat room, keeping your team informed of activity on your repositories. Our old integration only notified the room of pushes to git repositories, but didn’t give any more detail of what was pushed.
We’ve improved this so that in addition to the push notification, your team can quickly see how many commits were included in that push and a quick summary of up to the 5 commit messages included in that push.
Better communication = better coding!
Better Design Previews with Sharing Built In
One of our favorite features in Beanstalk is our Design Preview. It allows you to quickly share clickable HTML files or images with your team members or people outside your account. It’s found in the top right corner of any previewable file detail page.
We use this every day when discussing design mockups with our team, and reviewing the differences between the revisions to make a better decision. Because we use this feature so much, we noticed a few issues with how it worked.
Previously, you shared a specific “snapshot” of a file - but if you continued to save revisions of that file, it wasn’t possible to share the newest revisions of that file without breaking the old sharing link. In addition, the preview link didn’t remember the view type you selected when you shared it. Both of these problems created an inconsistent experience between the sharer and the recipient, and lots of confusion.
Now, the sharing button in Design Previews is more intelligent, allowing you to share new revisions without breaking old URLs. And, as a little cherry on top, sharing will now remember what view type you had selected in your Preview (default, split view or overlay) and will use the same one whenever the sharing link is opened.
Have you used sharing in Design Previews before? Now’s a great time to try it! We’d love to see some of your work shared, just add your preview links in the comments below so we can check it out. Remember, you can share JPGs and even static HTML.
If the Beanstalk’s activity feed is a stream, Hojoki is a river of activity feeds from your favorite hosted collaboration tools.
Hojoki lets you add accounts from Beanstalk, as well as Dropbox, Google Docs, Basecamp, Pivotal Tracker, Evernote, and more - and then create groups for your team to view and collaborate on all of those activity notifications in one place. Read more about their Beanstalk integration on their announcement blog post.
They’re generously offering t-shirts with this custom Beanstalk & Hojoki illustration.
Want one for free? We’ve got 10 to give away. Leave us a comment below and the first 10 will get a free t-shirt from the team at Hojoki.
More and more Beanstalk customers are taking advantage of our 3rd party integrations, and our webhooks, so we’ve been on the lookout for ways to improve them.
Multi-user support for Harvest Time Tracking
Previously, integrating Harvest into your Beanstalk account only allowed you to create time entries for the Harvest account owner.
With our recent improvements, Beanstalk will match the email address of the user committing to a user in Harvest and record a time entry for that user.
In order for this integration to work, the email address needs to match in both Beanstalk and Harvest.
Beanstalk will do the rest automatically!
Webhooks available on all accounts
As of today, webhooks are available for repos in all accounts including our free trial accounts. Not sure what you can do with webhooks? Check out our previous blog post about them.
We added a cool little feature last week to make your life easier. Now if you view a file in Beanstalk and the language isn’t detected automatically (missing file extension?) you can select it by yourself. Just click the little gear icon in the toolbar and pick one from our selection of 70+ languages and here you go, syntax highlighting that works!
This should make code reviews even easier, even when we don’t detect the language automatically. We hope you’ll like it!
I know that Chris and our team have been long-time admirer’s of Joel’s work at Fog Creek, and in a recent job post (we’re hiring a sysadmin!) I happened to notice that we score a healthy 11/12 on Joel’s Test as a software company ourselves.
Kelly Sutton, who Chris and I met several years ago at FOWA Miami while he was creating HackCollege, has his own version of these 12 steps that he’s written based on his recent experiences with building and launching LayerVault. He suggests that these are supplemental to Joel’s list, not a replacement, and we really like where he’s headed.
Do you only deploy from one branch?
Do you have a bootstrap script?
Do all employees deploy code on their first day?
Does each bug get a failing test?
Is your bus factor greater than n/2, where n is the number of engineers?
Can you spin up ad-hoc development and staging environments with one command?
Does your team work around features, and not around sprints?
Does all work get done on a branch?
Do you actively remove deprecated code?
Do bugs only exist in one place?
Do you discourage the use of IDEs?
Are discrepancies in process addressed before more code is written?
Kelly takes the time to expound on each of these questions on his post. How do you score? What would you like to be doing better? Are you using Beanstalk to achieve any of these goals? Let us know in the comments!
&post[three]=
Beanstalk allows designers and developers to store source code, track changes, and collaborate with team.
