[chef] Re: Re: Re: New user feedback and questions

[Tim Uckun < >]

Hey All.

I just installed chef yesterday after trying puppet and automateit and
if anybody is interested in the first impressions of an absolute
beginner here they are.

The chef server install is not accurate and is highly disruptive if
you already have rails sites.  Here are the issues I remember.

It undoes your passenger.conf (in my case it added passenger.conf and
left my mod_rails.conf). This not too bad of an issue.
It rewrites your default.conf. In my case this was disruptive.
It rewrites ports.conf and apache2.conf setting the user to www-data
(in my case that was disruptive the current way to do is to use the
$APACHE_RUN_USER env variable).

A better way to muck with apache would be to drop files into the
/etc/apache2/conf.d directory IMHO

It doesn't set the proper permissions in the /var/log/chef directory
(should be chef, chef).

I don't like the fact that the default place for cookbooks is
/srv/chef but I am sure I can get used it. It seems to me /etc/chef or
/var/lib/chef are more appropriate.

Speaking of which I guess I don't see the need for the runit
dependency either but maybe I'll like it and use it for other things
too. Same goes for couchdb (why not dbdb?)


The client install did not put any of the executables in the path.
They are all in /var/lib/gems... directory. Not that big of a deal but
the documentation should reflect that.  I am going to try the apt
repos today and see if they put the binaries in /usr/local/bin

I think the process of publishing cookbooks is cumbersome.  You write
them on your machine. Check them out on the server and then push them
to the server (do I have to restart apache?).  This process has too
many steps. Maybe the rake install should be smarter?

Speaking of which the documentation is too scattered (same can be said
of puppet BTW).  The wiki style documentation doesn't seem to lend
itself well to these kinds of projects.  Something more linear and
hierarchical would be better for me (I realize everybody is
different).


Yesterday I got the server up and the client (in a VM) going. Today I
am going to see if I can push a couple of cookbooks. Let's see what
happens.