[chef] Announcing chef-runner

[Mathias Lafeldt < >]

Hi,

Yesterday I released chef-runner [1] -- a little tool that speeds up
development and testing of Chef recipes with Vagrant.

What is chef-runner?

* A fast alternative to the painfully slow `vagrant provision`.
* Allows you to change infrastructure code and get immediate feedback.
* Integrates with Vim so you don't have to leave your editor while
hacking on recipes.

There's a demo video [2] that shows how chef-runner compares to
`vagrant provision` in terms of speed.

How does it work?

* Directly executes Chef Solo over (plain) SSH without the overhead of
`vagrant provision`.
* Only applies the Chef recipe you've actually modified by overriding
Chef's run list.
* Integrates well with Vagrant: provisioning works as long the VM is
running and /vagrant is mounted.
* Installs cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf and updates changes
with lightning-fast rsync.

I wrote chef-runner while working on the Practicing Ruby cookbook and
article [3]. The tool allowed me to do a lot of "exploratory
provisioning". I hope some of you will benefit from it too.

Any feedback is welcome.

-Mathias

[1] https://github.com/mlafeldt/chef-runner
[2] https://vimeo.com/78769511
[3] http://tinyurl.com/pr-chef