[chef] Re: Some Questions

[Adam Jacob < >]

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 11:51 AM, Martin Eigenbrodt
<
 >
 wrote:
> Hi everrybody,
>
> I'm currently digging into Chef and have some questions regarding the Idea 
> to have
> "Infrastructure as Code".
>
> 1) As I understand Cookbooks should be maintained in VCS. But it is still 
> possible
>  to locally modify a cookbook on a developers machine and upload it
> to the chef server, thus applying changes not present in any version 
> control. How do you handle this situation?
>  I could think of two measurement to solve this: a) Change 'knife cookbook 
> upload' to only accept cookbooks not changed against the git/svn.
>  b) Do not ever upload changeds directly, but commit them and let a CI 
> server apply them to a chef server (and maybe run some tests?). Is anybody 
> doing like that? Am I getting things totaly wrong?

Either are fine choices.  A common tactic would be to use a
post-commit/post-push hook in Git.

> 2)  How are changes to attributes tracked? As far as I understand there ist 
> nothingh that keeps track of changes to attributes. So I can not my 
> infrastructure as it was as at a certain time.

You can back the data up easily.  Something like this:

https://gist.github.com/671369

Stuck in a cron-job would allow you to back up the data (and perhaps
automatically check it in to source control.)

> 3)  I've played around with some recipes and often succeeded to upload 
> recipe and/or attribute files to my chef server that were syntactically 
> wrong, atlhough there seems to be some validation done during 'knife 
> cookbook upload'. Is there a way to get a stronger validation for my files 
> before uploading them?

The syntax checks pre-upload are just that - pure syntax.  Short of
running the code itself, there is no way to get a deeper validation.

> 4)  Is there a way to download cookooks from a side including dependencies?

knife cookbook site vendor with the '-d' switch.

> 5)  Is there any standard way to run automated tests against your cookbooks?

Not at this time - there has been some thought around cookbook
testing, but nothing formalized.

Best,
Adam

-- 
Opscode, Inc.
Adam Jacob, CTO
T: (206) 508-7449 E: