[chef] Re: Re: Knife fundamentals (what did I miss?)

[Maven User < >]

So there's no way to trigger a deployment from the webui?

I'm asking because what we want to do is have say, jenkins, upload a package (I'm guessing I only need to define the cookbook once) then from the webui, tell chef which chef-clients it needs to deploy it to.  

For instance, one push to chef then allow users to select which environment that artifact should be deployed to (dev integration, then qa, then staging, then production).

I _guess_ I could write a jenkins job that could sshexec the client call on the given node, but quite a few of the "nodes" are windows boxes.  Seems like a waste that the master server knows the agents and the agents know the master - too bad that same communication mechanism can't be used to trigger deployments as well.

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Brad Knowles < "> > wrote:

On Sep 16, 2011, at 2:49 PM, Maven User wrote:

> 1 - How do you tell chef to apply/deploy the software?  I updated the role for the chef-client but I never saw it get applied.  I had to restart the chef-client service.

You re-run chef-client.  If you've got it running every thirty minutes under cron, then it should auto-update within the next 30 minutes, one you upload the new cookbook or whatever.  If you don't have some automated process that is firing off a new chef-client every thirty minutes (or whatever), then you'll need to manually re-run chef-client on that box.

> 2 - If I have my own software, how does this get transferred up to the chef server?

You need to build your own cookbook for that and upload it to the chef server.  Assuming the new roles, etc... that you define for your own software are properly applied to the correct nodes, the next time they run chef-client, they should pick up the changes and do whatever you told them to do in the cookbook.

--
Brad Knowles < "> >
Junior Apprentice Prep Cook Trainee