[chef] Re: Re: Re: environment includes? role includes? run list in the environment?

[Peter Donald < >]

Hi,

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 1:11 PM, Jesse Campbell 
<
 >
 wrote:
> Well what i think i want, is a role (or recipe) that is dc1 specific, dc2
> specific, and dc3 specific.
> Then something to automagically add it to the list... (which sounds an awful
> lot like a recipe)
>
> i guess I could talk to my team about moving all our config out of roles and
> into recipes, but that means essentially abandoning roles (and environments)
> for config.

We still use roles to a degree. They are the top level recipes that
make sense to apply to a node. So we still do something like

------------------------------------------------
roles/iris_appserver.rb
------------------------------------------------
name 'iris_appserver'
description 'IRIS Server'
run_list('recipe[fisg-iris]')
------------------------------------------------

That way the role appears in our management application. Our
environments are also used to some degree but they tend to just
populate a couple of fields that are used by the base recipe to switch
on behaviour. They also tend to lock the version of the top level role
recipes. So they would look something like

------------------------------------------------
environments/training.rb
------------------------------------------------
name 'training'
description 'The Training environment'

cookbook_versions('fisg-iris' => '0.0.24')

override_attributes(
  'datacenter' => 'BWD',
  'cookbook_environment' => 'stable'
)
------------------------------------------------

This approach has allowed us to safely migrate cookbook versions
across environments with out many adverse impacts. However we
experienced many adverse impacts to get to this state ;)

-- 
Cheers,

Peter Donald