[chef] Re: Chef Server

[Miquel Torres < >]

Hi Tim,

what you describe seems to be LittleChef's way ;-)

There are basically no moving parts: you have your project's directory
(kitchen) with your cookbooks, roles and even nodes and databags,
which as you put it are just (JSON) files.

Have a look if you are interested: https://github.com/tobami/littlechef

Cheers,
Miquel


2012/1/2 Tim Uckun 
<
 >:
> Hey guys.
>
> As you may have guessed I am a noob  trying to get chef up and going
> for my infrastructure. I have some puppet experience but I wanted a
> more "just ruby" type of system so I am giving chef a go.  I also used
> automateit briefly and liked it quite a bit but it's abandoned so I
> decided against it.
>
> I just wanted to relay some thought from a beginner in hope that this
> can give some insight into what the experience is like for a person
> starting out. I hope you don't take any of this as criticism, just
> some musings that I hope might trigger discussion.
>
> I tried making things work just chef solo for about a week but I think
> I have come to the conclusion that I need a chef server.  A lot of the
> recipes presume a server and some things don't work with out it.
>
> There are so many moving parts in chef that it's kind of mind
> boggling.  Runit, solr, rabbitmq, merb (merb!!??), couchdb, chef,
> ohai, knife, and other addons like knife-solo (which needs python),
> librarian etc.  I am sure there is a good reason for all this but it's
> a bit intimidating to have to manage and learn all of these things.
>
> The bootstrap commands seem to ignore the fact you may have rubygems
> already installed and want to download one anyway. I wasn't expecting
> that and ended up writing my own bootstrap script.
>
> Knife, chef-client, chef-solo all need different config files and some
> items are repeated. I would prefer just one config file with all the
> options in it.
>
> It would be nice if I could define my nodes in ruby like I define all
> my recipes and roles. Same goes for databags.  I also prefer yaml to
> json but that's just me.
>
> The wiki is pretty nice, thanks to whoever is maintaining that.
>
> You guys have been most helpful on the mailing list. Thanks for your 
> patience.