[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Chef workstation on Windows

[Benjamin Bytheway < >]

Thanks for the pointer to bill's kitchen.  That looks like a great approach. My place needs something like this if we're going to get some traction getting more than just my team writing cookbooks. 

Thanks again,

Ben

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 1:27 PM, Torben Knerr < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I'm in the exactly same situation (windows workstation and linux servers), and bill's kitchen [0] is what works for me :-)

It gives you all you need for developing with chef on windows (e.g. ruby, devkit, chef, vagrant, git, editor, etc..) in a portable zip file (no need to install anything - just unpack and go). It has the additional benefit that if you are working in a team it's easy to distribute/setup and everyone uses the same environment (bye bye "it works on my machine").

It currently ships with Ruby 1.9.3.p392 which brings huge performance improvements compared to previous 1.9.3 versions (probably on par with 2.0). 

It's still on chef 10.x, but should be easy to update to chef 11 by editing this Gemfile [1]. The other gems in there might need an update as well. (note that this specific Gemfile is only used for installing a consistent set of useful chef-related gems to the bill's kitchen ruby before it's packaged into a zip file).

That being said, I'd definitely recommend to use project-specific Gemfiles declaring only the gems that you really need in this project (or chef repo or cookbook repo) and then use `bundle exec...`. This will reduce the load path to the minimum required for your project and can makes a huge difference - especially on windows.

HTH,

Torben

[0] https://github.com/tknerr/bills-kitchen

[1] https://github.com/tknerr/bills-kitchen/blob/master/files/Gemfile

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 8:18 PM, Benjamin Bytheway < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

We're trying to get chef client omnibus 11.4.4 currently.

I've tried using the windows ruby installer + devkit and install chef from gems. Installing win32-api from gems (--platform ruby to force a complie) appears to work, but when you try to require it, ruby can't find it. 

I did a manual install of the win32-api lib to site_ruby (not a gem) and it looks like ruby can find it that way, and knife runs (and MUCH faster).

I'll have to keep digging and see why win32-api gem doesn't install properly under 2.0.

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Daniel DeLeo < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I understand that Ruby 2.0 has some huge fixes that make the gem loading faster, but it looks like chef + ruby2 on Windows isn't working yet (win32-api gem isn't working). Is there a roadmap anywhere to get to Ruby 2 support (especially on Windows)?

Many gems with C extensions pre-compile them on windows. Newish versions of ruby gems will show you this by default:

    $ gem list win32-api -r

    win32-api (1.4.8 ruby x86-mingw32, 1.4.6 x86-mswin32-60, 1.4.0 x86-mswin32-80, 1.0.4 mswin32)

If you `gem fetch win32-api --platform x86-mingw32` and then `gem unpack` it, you can see that there's ruby ABI (binary interface) specific paths:

    $ ls -1 lib/win32

    api.rb

    ruby18

    ruby19

So, basically you need to track down the gem owners (see http://rubygems.org/gems/win32-api ) and convince them to make a new release with ruby 2.0 ABI extensions.

In the meantime, if you have compilers on your system, you can install these gems manually with `gem install GEMNAME --platform ruby` which will pull the gem that just has the C source and build the extensions on your box. If you go this route, I'd appreciate if you can let us know how it all works.

Thanks in advance,

Ben Bytheway

Thanks,

-- 

Daniel DeLeo