[chef] Using the "ark" resource to do simple install steps with an archive file

[Bryan Berry < >]

I see a lot of people reinventing the install process for tarballs, zipfiles, wars, etc, myself included

I have adapted infochimps' excellent install_from_release LWRP for downloading archives ('arks') from a given url, unpacking them to a given directory, and making them available to the rest of the system. 

# install Apache Ivy dependency resolution tool
ark "ivy" do
    release_url 'http://someurl.example.com/ivy.tar.gz'
    version '2.2.0'        
end

This example copies ivy.tar.gz to /usr/local/src/ivy-2.2.0.tar.gz, unpacks its contents to /usr/local/share/ivy-2.2.0/ -- stripping the leading directory, and symlinks /usr/local/share/ivy to /usr/local/shary/ivy-2.2.0

 ark 'jdk' do
   release_url 'http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u2-b13/jdk-7u2-linux-x64.tar.gz'
   version '7.2'
   home_dir "/usr/local/jvm/default" 
   add_global_bin_dir true
   user 'foobar'
 end

This example copies jdk-7u2-linux-x64.tar.gz to /usr/local/src/jdk-7.2.tar.gz, unpacks its contents to /usr/local/share/jdk-7.2/ -- stripping the leading directory, symlinks /usr/local/jvm/default to /usr/local/share/jkd-7.2, and adds /usr/local/share/jdk-7.2/bin/ to the global PATH for all users. The user 'foobar' is the owner of the /usr/local/share/jdk-7.2 directory

 ark 'liferay-client' do
   release_url "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/lportal/Liferay%20Portal/6.1.0%20GA1/liferay-portal-client-6.1.0-ce-ga1-20120106155615760.zip?r=http%3A%2F%2Fsourceforge.net%2Fprojects%2Flportal%2Ffiles%2FLiferay%2520Portal%2F6.1.0%2520GA1%2F&ts=1329490764&use_mirror=ignum"
   version "6.1.0"
   install_dir "/usr/local/share/tomcat/lib"
   home_dir "/usr/local/share/tomcat/lib"
   user "hitman"
   stop_file "portal-client.jar"
 end

This example uses a stop_file to signal that the ark does not need to be unpacked if "/usr/local/share/tomcat/lib/portal-client.jar" file exists.

The vast majority of the code was written by Flip Kromer and he deserves the credit. I changed the name in my fork because "install_from_release" is just too long for my minimalist tastes

https://github.com/bryanwb/cookbooks/tree/master/ark 

and the original  here: https://github.com/infochimps-labs/ironfan-pantry/tree/master/cookbooks/install_from

Infochimps install_from can also handle the install and configuration of arks with make, ant, and setup.py however I have not tested those aspects yet.

BryanWB