[chef] Re: Nginx reverse proxy: where to put config

[Seth Chisamore < >]

Andrew,

The best thing to do would probably be a combination of (a) and (c).  I'll try to explain.

You could create a new recipe called "reverse_proxy" in the nginx cookbook that would:

* do an include_recipe on the default nginx recipe (to install nginx)

* do a search for all app servers by an app role and an environment role (see the haproxy cookbook for an example)

* feed the data into a template resource

* enable the site (using the nginx_site definition) 

The actual role to use in the search could be set as an override in the role applied to your reverse proxy server (and could change per application).  This role would also include "nginx::reverse_proxy" in it's run_list.

If you found you needed more flexibility and wanted completely different reverse proxy conf files per application (vs just different nodes in the balance pool) you could create a cookbook for each application and store the template files in there.  When leveraging the application cookbook it is a best practice to create a cookbook named after your app (my_app) and placing any app-specific setup and configuration in the recipes and templates of this cookbook.  You could then force the template resource that lives in "nginx::reverse_proxy" resolve the load location for the template file via the cookbook attribute [0].  The value for the cookbook attribute (in the template resource) would be set in the role applied to your reverse proxy.

Hope that helps!

Seth

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[0] http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Resources#Resources-Template

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 9:54 PM, Andrew Miklas < "> > wrote:

Hi all,

I'm trying to create a role that installs nginx using the "nginx" cookbook and configures it to reverse proxy a bunch of unicorn instances configured using the "application" cookbook.

I need to put an nginx config file into /etc/nginx/sites-available, but I'm not sure in which cookbook the template & associated recipe should live.  There are three options, from what I can tell:

a) I could put it into the nginx cookbook.  This would involve creating a recipe that looks somewhere (a node attribute, maybe?) for a role name, and then creates an nginx config file containing a vhost and an upstream block containing the addresses of all nodes in the named role.  This puts logic into the nginx config that is reverse-proxy specific (which might not be so bad, I suppose).

b) I could put it into the application cookbook.  But then this ties "application" to nginx, which seems wrong

c) I could create a new cookbook to contain the recipe and template to generate the config.  This seems like it's overkill though.


Any ideas?  My guess is that option (a) is the way to go, but it seems like this is something that would have come up before.  Maybe I'm missing something obvious?


Thanks,


Andrew


------
Andrew Miklas
CTO & Founder, pagerduty.com
(650) 989-2965 x110