Chef is a systems and cloud infrastructure automation framework that makes it easy to deploy servers and applications to any physical, virtual, or cloud location, no matter the size of the infrastructure.
chef-solo is an open source version of the chef-client that allows using cookbooks with nodes without requiring access to a server.
In our company we started using chef-solo for automation process of bootstrapping bare servers for rails environment. In this repository we share all our work in this sphere and hope it helps somebody.
Kitchen for configurating server by standart rails components:
- rvm + defaulting ruby (i think it must be 2.0.0)
- nginx + passenger or unicorn (in future)
- mysql
- postgres
For testing kitchen you may use vagrant. It used by default. If you don't used vagrant yet follow this instructions:
gem install vagrant
vagrant box add precise64 http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/vagrant/precise/current/precise-server-cloudimg-amd64-vagrant-disk1.box
And then execute:
vagrant up
After your kitchen has changed run provisioner again:
vagrant provision
For cooking server are used knife solo command line tool. If you hasn't already cooked selected server you must run prepare command that installed chef-solo on it. For this run:
knife solo prepare username@hostname
After this file hostname.json will appear in nodes folder. You must specify cookbooks attributes and run list. You may use vagrant.json as example. When you already finished previous step run next command:
knife solo cook username@hostname
Cooking may take some time so you may make coffee. After all your server's software state is according to applied cookbooks. Enjoy!