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

[George Ornbo]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:50:28PM +0100, Viktor Tron wrote:
> I need to build a complicated stack including rvm, which already broke me:
> 
> since Paul's example is ubuntu specific, the closest generic recipe
> I found was this:
> https://github.com/blt04/puppet-rvm, which
> 
> - requires puppet > 2.6.7 which is not packaged for ubuntu 11.04
> - needs puppet to run twice
> - and in general looks quite idiosyncratic to use

I wouldn't install puppet through aptitude. Better to use RubyGems. If
you need to bootstrap a server there are a few bash scripts around. You
can use / modify one I wrote if you like 

https://gist.github.com/913526

That said if Chef works for you should use it - they are both excellent. 

> I would love to hear pros and cons (mainly from a rails perspective)
> in particular:
> 
> - do you use your provision agent for deployment? which allows for
> better management of rake tasks, cron, db privileges, etc

I use capistrano but cron, db privileges go into puppet.

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

Git submodules

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

There a good debate to be had as to where things sit between puppet and
bundler. I prefer to push the server (unicorn in my case) to be
installed with bundler and the app as I find it easier to upgrade than
passenger. I use puppet-rvm and the nginx module to set up Ruby and the
site and then use puppet to manage users, monitoring and firewall.