When I tell people that I am a Ruby developer, the first thing that immediately goes through their head is ruby on rails (ROR). However, Rails is just a web framework written in ruby. Besides the use of Ruby with Rails as a Web application development platform, there is another less-heralded side to Ruby, which is Ruby as a powerful scripting language, much in the same league as Python or Perl. It has immense capabilities, owing to the availability of many built-in and external libraries, the power of which can be harnessed to solve a lot of the scripting needs that might crop up in any work environment. Systems administration is one such work environment that demands a lot of scripting for making things simpler and more efficient. User management, Process management, File Management, Software package management, and other basic automation requirements are better handled with scripting than with monotonous manual effort. Ruby comes in very handy in this scenario. It has a good set of libraries for achieving this. If you are a system admin or your work involves doing regular sysadmin tasks or perhaps you are a Rubyist like me and want to explore ruby outside of rails or web development in general, then check out Cfruby - allows managed system administration using Ruby. It is both a library of Ruby functions for system administration and a Cfengine-like clone (in effect a domain specific language or DSL for system administration).
Cfruby is basically a package made up of two parts:
Cfrubylib – A pure Ruby library with classes and methods for system administration. This includes file copying, finding, checksumming, package management, user management, and more.
Cfenjin – A simple scripting language helpful in scripting system administration tasks (without knowing Ruby).
Cfruby can be downloaded as a Ruby gem or as a tar zipped file. The gem way is the simplest and the easiest. Get the gem and install it using the "gem install" command. Ruby rocks, Ruby is awesome. Happy Coding!