[chef] Re: Re: How best to reprepresent a hosted site in Chef?

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 3:50 AM, Dreamcat Four 
<
 >
 wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Dmitry V'yal 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> thanks to anyone, with your advices finally I've finished preparations and
>> I've started cooking my server.
>>
>> I described some basic stuff like web server configuration till now.
>>
>> Now I have more questions. It's main function is serving about two dozens 
>> of
>> sites we developed and currently supporting. Adding a new site is 
>> multi-step
>> process. Script I wrote adds an user, setups a repository, creates a
>> database, adds a config for webserver and log analysis system.
>>
>> There is currently no way to remove the site and no central repository 
>> where
>> the current configuration is stored. Also, there is a separate host used 
>> for
>> backups, it makes commits through ssh on a regular basis and fetches them
>> from the server. It's scripts need tweaking after adding a new site too.
>>
>> I feel all this chaos can be greatly reduced with Chef. I hope, at least.
>> But I'm not sure, how best to represent "the site" in terms of chef. For me
>> it looks like some kind of resource having it's attributes like domain 
>> name,
>> ip, username, passwords(?). Is it feasible to write an extension to Chef?
>> I've read it's quite easy.
>>
>> But also site can be described in terms of operations needed to set it up,
>> like add this user, create this file, put that file there and so on. This
>
> Well, if you write a custom resource then that resource can have
> resource actions associated to it. Just like any other chef resource.
> You are free to define these actions as you see fit.
>
> IMHO, it sounds like writing a chef resource is a good way to go. But
> dont forget to look at definitions too.
>
>> way I may use Chef as is, but such imperative descriptions give me an
>> uncomfortable feeling.
>>
>> I'd like to hear some thoughts from the community regarding my situation 
>> and
>> pros and conses of various approaches possible.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>> Dmitry
>>
>

Ohai!

If the sites are all very similar except for some data, you can just
create them in a loop. Our documentation for libraries shows an
example of creating vhosts based on data in a SQL database:

http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Libraries

If this looks appealing, but you don't currently have the data in a
database, you might want to use data bags to store the data:

http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Data+Bags

HTH,
Dan DeLeo