[chef] Re: Git / Chef workflow

[Alex Soto < >]

I'm doing what you propose now to manage cookbook development from local -> 
Qa -> staging -> prod

However, git only manages the source code.  Chef does not yet support 
environments, you have to 'fake it' by using a different chef server (or 
opscode platform org) for each environment.

This gist shows how I do it by reading in different knife configs based on 
the branch I'm on

https://gist.github.com/710473

You still need to upload your cookbooks, roles, etc into each server, so 
merging from local to qa won't do it (unless you put in a git hook to do that 
for you)

Hope that helps,

Alex

On Nov 22, 2010, at 10:40 AM, Ian Marlier wrote:

> Hey, All --
> 
> I'm working on figuring out how I'm going to implement Chef with git, and 
> my Google foo seems to be failing me.  I know roughly how I want things to 
> work, but I'm not sure whether it's possible, and I'm wondering if anyone 
> has links/pointers/experiences that they can share.
> 
> Here's what I would like to be able to do
> * Have a single git repository, with the following branches
>     - QA branch
>     - production branch
> * Have any given change be made exactly once.  That is, /etc/config.file 
> will only be edited by hand once, that edit will be applied via git merges 
> to every environment where it needs to be distributed.
> 
> This results in a standard workflow that looks like this:
>     - Changes are made in a local branch, and merged into QA
>     - QA chef server pulls down the changes, and applies them somehow 
> (`knife cookbook upload -a /path/to/local/repo` presumably, or at least 
> that's the only option that I've found so far -- it was pointed out to me 
> on the IRC channel.)
>     - Once changes have been validated in QA, they are merged from the QA 
> branch to the production branch
>     - Production chef servers pull down the changes, and apply them somehow 
> (presumably the same `knife cookbook upload....` command)
> 
> 
> I'm running into issues with this work flow, though, and I'm not sure if 
> its because I'm trying to do something that can't be done, or simply 
> because I'm doing things in the wrong way, or what.  Specifically:
>   - This doesn't handle anything other than cookbooks -- data_bags get 
> ignored, for example
>   - Because pulling a delete in git doesn't remove anything from the 
> filesystem, old cookbooks stick around
> 
> 
> Obviously, there are ways to work around both of these issues, but I don't 
> want to invent the wheel if someone else has already dealt with this.  So, 
> my questions:
> Are other people using chef/git in this way (where git comes before, as 
> opposed to after, chef)?
> If so, what's the secret sauce?  Are there scripts that I need to be 
> looking for that'll make this all easy?  Documentation that I can follow?
> Am I totally misunderstanding anything about how Chef works, given what I'm 
> trying to do?
> 
> 
> Thanks for any advice/pointers,
> 
> - Ian