Greg Taylor

Fabric task for notifying New Relic of a code deploy
Monday, February 11 2013

We’ve been doing some playing around with New Relic lately at Pathwright. One of the neat things it does is track when code deploys happen, and how they affect responsiveness and resource consumption.

In order to notify New Relic when a deploy happens, you simply POST to their web-based API with the information you’d like to include (change logs, commit hashes, etc).

We currently do this via a Fabric task, which I figured I’d share. We tend to run this from our deploy task. Enjoy!

import socket
import requests
from fabric.api import run, cd

def notify_newrelic_of_deploy(old_commit_hash):
    """
    New Relic tracks deploy events. Send a notification via their HTTP API.

    :param str old_commit_hash: The previously deployed git hash. This is
        easily retrieved on a remote machine by running 'git rev-parse HEAD'.
    """

    with cd(env.REMOTE_CODEBASE_PATH):
        new_commit_hash = run('git rev-parse HEAD')
        changes = run('git --no-pager log %s..HEAD' % old_commit_hash)

    headers = {
        # Adjust this to reflect your API key.
        'x-api-key': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    }
    payload = {
        'deployment[app_name]': 'Your App Name',
        # This is also very important to update with your own value.
        'application_id': '1234567',
        'deployment[description]': 'Fabric deploy is fun deploy',
        'deployment[revision]': new_commit_hash,
        'deployment[changelog]': changes,
        'deployment[user]': '%s@%s' % (LOCAL_USERNAME, socket.gethostname()),
    }

    requests.post("https://rpm.newrelic.com/deployments.xml",
                  data=payload, headers=headers)

Switched to Pelican
Sunday, February 10 2013

For the last four years, my blog has been powered by Django. As I have found myself becoming more and more busy, I have stopped wanting to hassle with keeping things up to date on the server and the application.

After a weekend of tinkering and conversions, I’m now ...

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Ansible first impressions
Friday, February 08 2013

After brief visits with Puppet and Chef for config management, I’ve set my sights on Ansible. It’s late and I’ve been staring at this stuff for way too long today, but here are some early observations:

  • I really like that it is written in Python. Puppet and ...
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Amazon Elastic Transcoder Review
Wednesday, January 30 2013

Amazon Elastic Transcoder was released just a few short days ago. Given that we do a lot of encoding at Pathwright, this was of high interest to us. A year or two ago, we wrote media-nommer which is similar to Amazon’s Transcoder, and it has worked well for us ...

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python-route53 released!
Wednesday, November 14 2012

After some more time in the cooker, python-route53 1.0 has landed on PyPi. This is a stand-alone Route 53 package, independent from the one in boto. The major hilights are:

  • Python 2.7 and 3.x compatibility.
  • Extremely simple API
  • Powered by requests

Read the documentation, see the source ...

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python-route53 feedback wanted
Thursday, November 08 2012

Late last night (or early this morning), I finished the draft of python-route53, a stand-alone Route 53 module with Python 3.x and Python 2.7 compatibility. Route 53 is an excellent DNS service offered by Amazon Web Services. It exposes everything through an API.

My intentions with python-route53 are ...

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Evennia MUD server gets BSD’d
Friday, November 02 2012

As of a few days ago, the Evennia MUD server has been re-licensed under the BSD License. We feel like this will knock down another barrier for those considering running a game with Evennia. I can’t recommend this codebase enough for anyone who may have caught the MUD development ...

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python-fedex and colormath re-licensed under BSD
Tuesday, October 23 2012

I am happy to announce that python-fedex and python-colormath have been re-licensed under the BSD License. At the time these two packages were created, there were reasons for GPL’ing these. However, said reasons have long since been removed, so it’s BSD time!

My involvement with both of these ...

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python-bluefin 1.3 released
Tuesday, October 16 2012

python-bluefin 1.3 has been released, now with improved error handling. The major feature in this release is that we have smoothed over some inconsistencies in Bluefin’s error handling.

Instead of setting an HTTP status code indicating an error like they do for most of the Bluefin API errors ...

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python-bluefin 1.2 released, sans urllib2
Wednesday, September 19 2012

python-bluefin 1.2 has been released. python-bluefin is a very thin wrapper around the Bluefin payment gateway’s API. The two major changes are:

  • urllib2 has been removed, with the excellent requests taking its place.
  • We now check directmode’s status_code for known failure codes and raise exceptions based on ...
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