Github released today some new oauth scopes, which are perfect for our authentication system (aka: “Gatekeeper”).

From now on, the new and only scope used for authentication will be user:email (“gives apps read-only access to a user’s private email addresses”). Since the scope changed, you will need to accept again the app, and once done, we will only be able to read your public data + private email:

Reminder /!\

For existing accounts, you must link your account after login into gatekeeper, using the link “Connect Github account” in your account page:

One of the most asked features is being released today: You can now connect to your Tech-Angels account using your Github account! No more password needed, unless you want one. Please read the following before trying the feature:

Existing users

If you already have a Tech-Angels account (ie: to use https://gemnasium.com), you must sign-in first with your current account, and then link it with your Github account:

You can unlink your account from the same location.

New users

New users can simply click on the new “Connect with Github” link in the nav bar. If your public data is complete on Github, your account should be created right away, otherwise you will be invited to fill your missing information.

New password policy

This feature introduce a new policy regarding passwords:

• Users coming from Github directly don’t have a password, so it won’t be required to update your account information
• Users who linked their existing account have a password, it will be asked to update your account information.

If you don’t have a password, and want to increase the security of your account, you can set-up one after sign-up from Github. It will then be asked to protect modifications on your account (including plans subscriptions very soon).

Why do I have to allow the application twice on Github when I use Gemnasium?

Our account management app (Gatekeeper) is using the smallest scope available on github, it will just fetch your user ID + your public data. While this is enough to create a Tech-Angels account, Gemnasium needs to access to your repositories to check dependencies.

In continuation of the capistrano subject, we would like to introduce Webistrano, edited by Peritor.

Webistrano is a web interface to the Capistrano tool. It pulls projects from a Git repository (in our case it’s gitHub) and place the files on the web server.

Webistrano allows to roll back to an earlier version in case of problem, it also keeps a log of every deployment. Most important, it allows users (our customers) to deploy without any direct access to servers.

Read More

Tired of writing long git paths to github repositories in Gemfile? Then you will find this useful. When the repository you need is public, you can use :github shortland instead of :git. And just specify github username and repository name separated by slash.

If repository name and username are the same, you can drop one:

    gem "rails", :github => "rails/rails"

    gem "rails", :github => "rails"

Are both equivalent to:

    gem "rails", :git => "git://github.com/rails/rails.git"

I wonder, how didn’t we enjoy this all the time? :)