[chef] Re: Chef-solo or Chef-client for local testing

[Will Maier < >]

Hi Jay-

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 05:43:54AM -0700, 

 
 wrote:
> I'm thinking it is nice to be able to have a fully isolated environment 
> using
> chef-solo locally with say a Vagrant box or any other vm offering of your
> choice.  The reason I say this is if you had all your developers using the 
> same
> production chef-server and same environment that there is a chance that you
> could all stomp on each others toes.  I know you can freeze the version but 
> now
> I have to keep maintaining my version list locally which I feel could be a
> maintenance nightmare if you have a lot of cookbooks.  My thought is you 
> would
> use chef-solo for local development and then after you commit your changes 
> it
> goes to a continuous integration environment where chef-client is used.  In 
> the
> continuous integration environment it could use environment=development and
> that environment could specify what version to use.  After it has 
> successfully
> been tested in the continuous integration environment the production
> environment file then gets a bump to use the new version that was just 
> tested. 
> Anyone see any holes in this process or have any suggestions for a better
> approach?  If you think chef-client would be a better choice for local dev 
> can
> you offer up some ideas on how it would work with multiple users?

You probably need both -- if you use features chef-solo doesn't provide in
production, I bet you want to test them, too. We use chef-solo while iterating
on cookbooks and to sanity-check proposed changes later in their life, but we
still want to test interactions between the client and server. We don't have 
an
automated workflow to capture the above yet, but it's on the list.

-- 

Will Maier
http://wcm.aier.us/