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

[Alex Kiernan < >]

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Joshua Timberman 
<
 >
 wrote:

> 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?
>

Omnibus has been a complete god-send for us. We're stuck on
RedHat/Oracle Linux 5.5, prior to omnibus whenever we rolled out a new
chef client it was a week of intense pain as we tried to find some
combination that worked whilst breaking workstations left right and
centre (we're a combined development/operations team - we use
chef-client on our workstations and CI, then chef-solo all the way
through to production).

In the two days I worked between Christmas and New Year I updated
everything to 0.10.8-2 and then for good measure rolled out a new chef
server using the omnibus packages - compared to our last rollout of
chef server (roughly a year ago - we were on 0.10.0) it was remarkably
painless. We've got the omnibus build process off-pat inside mock now
so I'm hoping to push it onto our Jenkins server some time in the near
future.

We'd previously tried umpteen approaches to getting a good install:

- rvm
- third party repos
- build it everywhere
- probably some more I've forgotten!

We're principally a Java shop so for the most part we're not worried
about any ruby on a box (other than for Chef) - for sysadmin stuff I
tend to push additional gems into the omnibus ruby, but it's a klunky
approach, if we were actually deploying something which was ruby I'd
want a properly packaged (modern) ruby which I could use, but still
separate from Chef.

-- 
Alex Kiernan