benglerpebbles/brow — Issue #1: Needs to work on Ubuntu (and possibly other linuces)
Author: simen
Created: 2012-01-09 12:35:20+00:00
State: open

Brow currently works only for OS X. These are the parts that are known to be platform specific at this point:

In `hostsfile.rb` line 17 `dscacheutil -flushcache` is used to flush the DNS-cache.

In `nginx_config.rb` the method locate_mime_types finds the file `mime.types` from the nginx bundle by looking in the folders used by popular OS X package managers (MacPorts, Homebrew)

Also some places I use backticks to call unix commands (like calling `kill` to signal processes) while I should have used the Process api in ruby. I also use `lsof` and `ps` to find running processes and extract data about them. This makes brow vulnerable to the specific formatting of the output from these commands on a particular system. Brow would be more robust if it used more stable api's for this, but I have not researched if that is possible. This is particularly relevant in `server_process.rb`.

In `watcher.rb` the gem `guard` is used to watch the file system. This should be platform independent, but might not be.

Also `watcher.rb` looks for the command `growlnotify` to display user notifications. Growl is an OS X specific application, but something similar may exist for linux?¨

Good luck!