[LRUG] puppet or chef [was: availability of talks]

[Henry Garner]

On 18 Aug 2011, at 23:50, Viktor Tron wrote:
> After I found this impressive piece of work https://github.com/fnichol/chef-rvm
> I am considering switching to Chef.

I've recently explored a similar set up (Ubuntu 10.04, RVM, Chef). Fletcher's project is impressive, but still quite new. The API was still changing as little as a fortnight ago.

In the end http://help.opscode.com/kb/troubleshooting/may-i-use-rvm-to-install-ruby-andor-rubygems-that-the-chef-client-runs-under convinced me to write my own bootstrap script to install ruby and rubygems from source before any of the chef magic happens.

> - do you use your provision agent for deployment? which allows for better management of rake tasks, cron, db privileges, etc

I'm still using capistrano for deployment, but my deploy script just executes chef-client on the remote server and leaves chef to synchronise everything.

The chef deploy resource has a few different callbacks which allow you to symlink your shared directories, install your bundle, call whenever to update your crontab, etc.

> - if you use public recipes/modules, how do you manage their updates?

I haven't needed to do this yet, but since your chef-repo is under version control all the normal rules apply.

> - any pointers to good resources for your typical rails stack using puppet/chef would be fab

Opscode hosts an 'application' cookbook which aims to be a bit of a swiss army knife for deploying all manner of apps. I found it to be the single most helpful resource for figuring out how to deploy my app and dependencies (I ended up hacking it about to write my own application-specific cookbook as a learning exercise). https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks/tree/master/application

I'm sure Stephen and John would appreciate me pointing out that their books on Chef and Puppet are recently released & imminent respectively. Mine is in the post :-)

Henry