Ruby for Systems Administration

Solution 1:

Puppet and Chef are two very popular configuration management tools, that are written in Ruby. I recon their use and popularity will spawn some use of Ruby in the sysadmin field. Python and Perl are so abundantly available however (and installed by default on most *nix flavors) that Ruby is be dwarfed by them. I expect that to be the case for the foreseeable future.

Solution 2:

Ruby is an excellent language for sysadmin scripting. Rake is also a great tool for many sysadmin tasks.

I highly recommend the book "Everyday Scripting With Ruby". Also, check out the ruby PLEAC site for some great examples.

HTH!

Tom Purl

Solution 3:

Ruby is generally regarded as specially good for implementing domain specific languages.

One tool that uses this strength that comes to mind is Puppet, but I'm sure there are others:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_(software)

Me in particular - I don't use Ruby for sysadmin tasks directly, but I do use Puppet.

Solution 4:

As there are books on the topic, and even the IBM/AIX crowd has gotten into the game I would say there are plenty of people doing it. I haven't personally deployed many ruby scripts, but we have written a few service daemons with it, and it's a very nice language, with much of the power of Perl but fewer of the "Write Only" tendencies.