[chef] couchbase community cookbook: New nodes cannot join existing cluster

[Christopher Armstrong < >]

ohai chefs,

I'm trying to use the community cookbook for couchbase and I've been running into some trouble. I wasn't sure if I should open an issue on the cookbook repo, but figured I'd ask here first in case I'm overlooking something.

I'm trying to setup two new couchbase servers to share a new cluster (we are evaluating couchbase as a replacement for memcached). I have a wrapper cookbook for couchbase which sets node['couchbase']['server']['username'] and node['couchbase']['server']['password'] to be the same thing, which in theory should create a default cluster with the same login info (see https://github.com/juliandunn/couchbase/blob/master/recipes/server.rb#L134-L139). This is indeed what happens, but both nodes as they are bootstrapped create their own clusters instead of sharing one. Digging into the LWRP, it looks like create_if_missing will connect to localhost, and never attempt to connect to an existing cluster (https://github.com/juliandunn/couchbase/blob/master/libraries/cluster_provider.rb#L18-L24 and https://github.com/juliandunn/couchbase/blob/master/libraries/client.rb#L5-L7). So, for a node's first run, create_if_missing will always create a cluster consisting of a single node. Subsequent runs on that node will see the local cluster, but never one consisting of more than the single node.

Has anyone used this cookbook successfully for this purpose? With this behavior, clusters are not very useful. Following the code, it makes sense why it's not working. I'm happy to investigate changing and fixing the cookbook, but I wanted to see if this was a misuse first. I think the solution would be to perform a search for all couchbase servers, see if the cluster exists for any of them, and then attempt to join that cluster. Or, an IP could be specified to connect to as a member of the cluster to join.

Any input is much appreciated!

Thanks,

Chris