[chef] My Wishlist: Better Chef-Solo Support

[Torben Knerr < >]

Ohai Chefs,

are you cooking solo?

I'm trying to figure out a sane way of working with Chef-solo, thereby came across lots of useful projects aiming to make the Chef-solo experience better, e.g.:

 * https://github.com/matschaffer/knife-solo

 * https://github.com/tobami/littlechef

 * https://github.com/edelight/chef-solo-search

 * ...

They add features which are currently missing from Chef solo, e.g.

 * data_bags (also encrypted data_bags) 

 * search (within node and data_bags)

 * environments support

There is also a proof of concept which integrates knife-solo with the `knife bootstrap` command by passing a `--solo` option, which lets you transparently use knife-ec2, knife-rackspace, etc. (name any plugin which uses `knife bootstrap`) with Chef solo as well.

It seems to me that there is much demand for better Chef-solo integration in the community, but unfortunately this is not there yet and you have to cherry-pick specific patches from the approaches above if you want a better Chef solo experience.

I'd really love to see these approaches being integrated into core Chef and have a single and consistent way of working with it.

Is there anything that prevents this from happening or is it just that nobody had done it yet?

Cheers, Torben