[chef] Re: Ruby, Chef, Omnibus and you!

[Andrea Campi < >]

Joshua,

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Joshua Timberman 
<
 >
 wrote:
> Ohai!
>
> I'd like to start a conversation and collect feedback about how Chef
> should manage Ruby at an OS/app level, in particular when Chef is
> installed using the "Omnibus" full stack installer[0]. Feedback
> collected will better help us in providing cookbooks that work with
> Ruby applications besides Chef.
...
> What are you doing in your environment to manage Ruby? Are you using
> the same installation of Ruby with Chef *and* your application? If you're
> using the Omnibus full-stack installer, are you managing a separate
> Ruby for your applications?

as you know well, we run FreeBSD on most of our servers. Some of them
don't need ruby except for chef, or don't care about a specific
version. On the others (mostly app servers running rails), we've had a
mixed experience.
Chef on ruby 1.8.7 is prone to crashing hard quite often; sometimes we
have 2-3 crashes in a row on subsequent chef-client runs.
Luckily, we only run 1.8 on a few legacy servers so that's not been a
big issue; at least not big enough to look for a complicated solution.
But that's a good example of something we are looking forward to solve
once we standardize on Omnibus.

The scenario is pretty much the same with our customers: most of the
ones who run Rails apps have already moved to 1.9 (or have been using
JRuby), with a small number of legacy apps on 1.8.

We do love rvm on developer workstations, but we don't really care for
the complexity of running it on production servers.
Also, going forward we are focusing on CloudFoundry, which does a very
good job letting each app use the version of ruby it wants, regardless
of what the rest of the system runs.

So the bottom line for us is: as long as Omnibus works nicely, and we
can have a way of installing a separate ruby 1.9 and gems for it, we
don't really need a move involved solution.

Andrea