[chef] Introducing Goiardi, an in-memory Chef server written in Go

[Jeremy Bingham < >]

Some of you are aware that I've been working for a few months on an in-memory chef server written in Go (basically, it's like chef-zero, but in Go). I ended up holding off on making a formal release for it until I got search working, which ended up taking rather longer than I expected. ("It'll be fine, I said. Write a search parser, I said!")

It's reached a point, though, where I can make a formal 0.2.0 release. All the major chef bits are up and running, search (except for sorting and some weirdness with fuzzy and boosted searches) works, and it seemed like a good point. It performs pretty well against chef-pedant too, except for anything related to authentication and permissions. There are a few tests where chef-pedant is unhappy because of minor JSON formatting differences or different error messages, but in those situations goiardi does the right thing otherwise. 

It works pretty much like chef-zero does right now, so it isn't that useful in and of itself at the moment. Pretty soon though I want to add config file support and the ability to freeze the in-memory data to disk when the program quits, so the data can persist across restarts. Further down the road, I'd like to also get authentication and permissions going, let you hook it up to a real database and solr, that sort of thing. It should, at least, build on any platform go supports (natively or with gccgo - I'm going to test it out on one of the Solaris derivatives soon).

Anyway, if anyone's interested, it's at https://github.com/ctdk/goiardi. Take a look, bang on it, see what breaks (and, possibly, what doesn't).

-j