If you use Chef you may find you aren't sure if your cookbooks are in sync with what is on the server. Especially if your cookbooks are individual git repos. I just created this gem to help out.

If you feel like most of the ruby daemon libs out there are overly complex or unstable, try forker. My goal was to write the simplest code possible to daemonize code, redirect output and manage the pidfile. Been using it in production to run resque workers on ubuntu and it has been rock solid for me.