h1. Refinery

Refinery is a distributed processing framework written in the Ruby
programming language. It is designed to work with Amazon's Web
Services such as SQS and S3 to distribute image and data processing
across multiple severs to alleviate the need for heavy-duty data and
image processing on web application servers.

Interprocess messaging is accomplished through a distributed queue system such as Amazon SQS and data storage is accomplished through a distributed data store
such as Amazon's S3.

h2. Required Libraries

* RightScale AWS
* JSON
* Moneta

h2. Optional Libraries

If you want to run the monitor then you'll need to install Sequel and have SQLite3 installed.

If you want to run the stats server to view operational statistics
about Refinery then you'll need to install Sequel, SQLite3 and Ramaze.

h2. Executing

Refinery have several executable scripts that are used to launch the various components:

h3. bin/refinery

This command executes the refinery execution server. This is where jobs
are run.

Example: bin/refinery -c config/config.yml

h3. bin/epub

This command executes all publishers that fire on a regular basis.

Example: bin/epub -c config/config.yml

h3. bin/pubnow

This command executes a single publisher once.

Example: bin/pubnow -c config/config.yml sample

h3. bin/monitor

This command is used to run the monitor system. The monitor system tracks the health of the refinery. The monitor should only be run on a single host.

h2. Tests

To run the tests, do one of the following:

* Use autotest
* Use the command `rake`
* Run by hand with `ruby -Ilib -Itest unit/test_to_run.rb`