Scissors is really two things:

• An administration tool for Debian
• A PaaS based on Docker.io

So basically, scissors will let you take any Debian system, and, in one command, configure the entire system so that you type "git push" and your Docker application deploys. It's that easy.

You can also run a scissors host from inside Vagrant. So if you are developing Docker applications on OSX, you can get them running in like 1 command.

scissors is powerful enough to wrangle complex administrative tasks like building Python from source and upgrading your kernel. So you can also use scissors to configure the inside of your Docker container, if you're using Debian as a base.

If you're on Debian, this installs scissors on any system whatsoever:

wget https://raw.github.com/drewcrawford/scissors/master/install_scissors.sh -O - | sudo bash

On other platforms (e.g. OSX) you can install scissors from pip, if you have pip installed:

sudo pip install git+https://github.com/drewcrawford/scissors.git 

If you're developing any Docker applicaton and you want to run it on your Mac, we have pre-built Vagrant images that you can spin up that do exactly that.

Copy the prebuilt.Vagrantfile over to your project's respository. Then just

vagrant up
vagrant ssh-config --host vagrant-deploy | sed -e 's/\(User\) vagrant/\1 deploy/g' >> ~/.ssh/config #configure normal SSH for use with vagrant
scissors -H vagrant-deploy add_remote:.,development
git push development master

Subsequent deploys only require the push.

Spinning up a complete PaaS is as simple as:

scissors -H [SSHSpec] config_scissors_host

Where SSHSpec is something like root@example.com. scissors will SSH into the server and configure everthing. You can also use localhost as the spec.

(Note: At present, Debian requires a reboot to upgrade the kernel. So you must run the command at least twice.)

Now on your development machine, you can set up a git remote like this:

scissors -H deploy@any-scissors-host.com add_remote /path/to/project.git production

And now just deploy with

git push production master

A full Vagrant server is provided:

vagrant up

Note that after the kernel is modified (eg.w ith scissors_config_server) you must reinstall the virtualbox-guest-additions. To accomplish this, scissors supports the install_virtualbox_additions command.