[chef] Re: Re: Re: application builds/ci involving Chef

[John Dyer < >]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 1:14 AM, Sascha Bates < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Thanks. I'm in an environment where we use jenkins and maven for a lot of this at the moment. There's also some Vagrant/vbox in the mix as well as Eclipse/STS. I'm not looking for pointers so much as being interested in what others have found to be successful.

One of the problems I see is that Chef code and Application code are decoupled: different repos, different teams managing collections of cookbooks, diverse environments. Dev teams don't think of Chef as part of the code base and I believe that this has led to some dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors. At the moment I'm noodling on methodology for introducing a tool like Chef that decouples configuration code from application logic. 

This is actually a pain point for us as well, and really the only way we were able to solve it was thru policy, in short we just made sure Ops was notified of any changes to configuration files managed by Chef.  

So I guess I'm maybe not looking for deployment solutions so much as wondering what people are doing to get their chef and app code working together and how it's working out for them.

   Right now we are not testing the cookbooks in isolation, but we do use them as part of our functional tests suite for the core products.  In these case Jenkins spins up a slave for the actual test, and then that mgmnt slave then spins up 2 vanilla EC2 instances ( Driver and Catcher ).  We then have a small fog script which does the "bootstrapping" on the instances.  It installs Chef via omnibus, installs our yum repo, and then drops the first-run.json.  It then triggers the chef run on the node.  The Jenkins slave server then controls the "driver" instance which then exercises about 500 scenarios on the actual runtime instance.   So far this is working well for us, but there certainly is room for improvement :) 

-John

 

Sascha Bates | " target="_blank"> | 612 850 0444 | | |

On 1/26/13 9:59 PM, Gourav Shah wrote:

Is anyone here doing application builds (either yourself or for devs) that involve any of the following:

-Local (workstation) testing of a developed app with Chef housing configuration files

For local development with chef managing configs, you could try using vagrant + chef 

 

-Application bundling with ant, maven, groovy, scripts, whatever that also includes parallel check-ins to Chef code?
-CI testing of an application that builds an artifact but also has configurations in Chef?

I have used Jenkins + chef.  You could also add capistrano in the mix for deployment. 

Thanks

Gourav