[chef] Re: Re: Re: ideas on deploying java applications

[Haselwanter Edmund < >]

Do you already have a CI Server in place? Then it probably comes with a kind 
of
"download url". Put that in a remote file resource and use your deploy 
mechanism.

What I have done for a client is:

- Wrote a small Rails App as a kind of JSON Builder for Chef 
- This Rails App connects to Cruise from Thoughworks and presents the user 
with the latest successful builds of a pipline
- The user checks the build to deploy which is stored
- after that (an some other configuration options for apache, tomcat6, god, 
...) the user can initiate a chef-solo run
- the rails app (in fact its webistrano with this custom extension -> many 
thanks to the awesome peritor folks!) has a task copying over the generated 
json to the target maschine and runs chef solo

=> the json could be written by hand but this enables not so tech savvy 
people be agnostic to the inner workings of the deploy process
=> each deploy has its own server-config json string
==> you could point to another machine an do the same stuff. in fact i did 
that to have the same stuff on dev and prod stages
=> you can go back in time and have some basic "I want this maschine at the 
state of 03-23-2010" if you have the content to clone (which I have on amazon 
EBS)

chef does the heavy lifting

happy cooking :-)

On 05.10.2010, at 19:47, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> We're looking at a similar issue, and so far we've found a couple
> other options, each of which has its own scaling issues, but might be
> appropriate in some cases.
> 
> 1. Have the recipe check the code out and do a build.
> 
> This is more heavyweight than it needs to be, obviously, and
> introduces build-time dependencies into the runtime deployment, but
> it's viable if the app and/or the deployment is small enough.  It has
> the advantage of keeping the support infrastructure simple.
> 
> But as long as your build server is able to talk to Chef to update the
> WAR's new location/name, why not just do this instead:
> 
> 2. Upload the WAR itself as a cookbook file.
> 
> This has the advantage that you don't introduce a new network access
> dependency between your target nodes and your artifact repository (or
> source code repository for option 1); if they can talk to the Chef
> server, they can get the files.
> 
> 
>> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Seth Chisamore 
>> <
 >
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Fellow Cooks,
>>> I've been brainstorming on the best approach to incorporate Java-based web
>>> application deployments into the Chef ecosystem.  The tricky thing we have
>>> to contend with, is the two step build/deploy process most Java 
>>> applications
>>> go through.  In most Java shops code is checked out from the SCM and then
>>> some sort of build framework like Maven compiles and packages the
>>> application down into a deployable artifact (usually a WAR file).  This
>>> artifact is then deployed into the Java application server(s).
>>> 
>>> Right now the data-bag driven application cookbook uses a one-step
>>> approach...ie code is just checked out and sym-linked as "current".  It
>>> would be nice to have a Java application that is deployed via this 
>>> cookbook
>>> follow a similar pattern.  The application cookbook can just pull the 
>>> final
>>> deployable WAR file down from some arbitrary location...ie a valid URL 
>>> whose
>>> reference lives in the application data bag.
>>> We still have to deal with the "build" portion though....or do we?  Most
>>> Java shops that are using something as sophisticated as Chef for 
>>> application
>>> deployments probably already have a continuous integration server that 
>>> does
>>> "builds".  That's awesome and we shouldn't change it!  What we need to do 
>>> is
>>> just hook into this workflow...ie have Chef be the final mile.
>>> 
>>> In order to solve this I propose creating a Maven plugin that would do the
>>> following after a successful build:
>>> -push the completed WAR to a configurable distribution point (Artifactory,
>>> S3 etc.).
>>> -grab a reference to the completed WAR (artifact download url)
>>> -make an authorized PUT request to the Chef server and update the
>>> application data bag with the the WAR's new location/name.  We could
>>> probably leverage the jclouds chef-client to do this (ie the CI server or
>>> build machine becomes a node).
>>> 
>>> The next time the chef-client runs on all application servers the new
>>> artifact should be pulled down and the deployment is complete.  I think
>>> creating a Maven plugin is the best approach since most CI servers work 
>>> well
>>> with Maven.  A smaller shop that doesn't have a CI server could also just
>>> check the code out of SCM and perform a build via Maven.
>>> 
>>> Thoughts?
>>> 
>>> Seth
>>> --
>>> Opscode, Inc.
>>> Seth Chisamore, Technical Evangelist
>>> T: (404) 348-0505 E: 
>>> 
 
>>> Twitter, IRC, Github: schisamo
>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Mark J. Reed 
> <
 >

--
DI Edmund Haselwanter, 

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