[chef] Re: Best Practice Performing Upgrade and Uninstall

[Arnold Krille < >]

Am 2013-08-21 04:20, schrieb Howard Zhang:
> Hi,
>
> I am new to Chef.
>
> I ran over some recipes in several cookbooks maintained by the 
> community.
>
> All I see is installation.  I wonder the best practice of upgrading 
> and
> uninstalling software?
>
> Could you give me some brief idea how to upgrade and uninstall 
> software?
> (please do not say " apt-get uninstall").

Some cookbooks ship recipes for uninstall. But most don't bother.
Either you uninstall via "apt-get uninstall <pkg>" (I prefer purge). Or 
you just throw that vm away.
When you automate the creation of virtual machines, its easier to just 
remove the recipe from the node and re-install the node then to spent 
valuable tech-time touching the node(s) and removing the software by 
hand.

Upgrading I do by hand (apt-get upgrade). I tried using the :upgrade 
action on the package resource once, but that upgrades packages as soon 
as some new version is available and not during hours I have time for 
this. Its not much fun when the whole web-app shuts down during 
office-hours because apache has to stop, update and restart. Better 
schedule that time. Or just create a new node with the current versions, 
let the reverse-proxy pick that up and then remove the old node...

Have fun,

Arnold