Introduction
I've become interested in learning how the open-core business model works. In particular, I'm interested in how software engineer Mike Perham runs Sidekiq as a million-dollar business with no employees.
With that in mind, my next deep-dive into open-source codebases will be the free version of the Sidekiq gem. My goal is to not only learn some Ruby coding best practices, but to learn how open-core libraries achieve the dual goal of making the core functionality free, while getting premium customers to pay a monthly fee for extra features.
I've pulled down the latest code from Sidekiq's Github repo, and am currently pointing to commit # 7c41779ad6ea196d75c84a46a1df04405bb6202f. The entry point for this code base (aka the file which gets executed first) is a script named bin/sidekiq, so that's the file I'll inspect first.
The file's code
Relative to the root project directory, the file we'll be reviewing first is bin/sidekiq.
The file is only 38 lines of code long:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# Quiet some warnings we see when running in warning mode:
# RUBYOPT=-w bundle exec sidekiq
$TESTING = false
require_relative "../lib/sidekiq/cli"
def integrate_with_systemd
return unless ENV["NOTIFY_SOCKET"]
Sidekiq.configure_server do |config|
config.logger.info "Enabling systemd notification integration"
require "sidekiq/sd_notify"
config.on(:startup) do
Sidekiq::SdNotify.ready
end
config.on(:shutdown) do
Sidekiq::SdNotify.stopping
end
Sidekiq.start_watchdog if Sidekiq::SdNotify.watchdog?
end
end
begin
cli = Sidekiq::CLI.instance
cli.parse
integrate_with_systemd
cli.run
rescue => e
raise e if $DEBUG
warn e.message
warn e.backtrace.join("\n")
exit 1
end
We'll probably need more than one post to cover all of this, so let's get started.