[chef] Re: Re: Re: Single centralized git repo vs. git repo per cookbook

[Morgan Blackthorne < >]

This is actually something that we've been discussing at my workplace. Right now, we have one master repo for all of our cookbooks, each in their own subdirectory. Bamboo is polling this repo and will execute a Rake task on updates to push out new changes via Berkshelf, where the cookbooks are listed using the 'rel' tag (assuming it passes knife cookbook test on each of the cookbooks). We also have a secondary scheduled job that runs foodcritic/rubocop and reports on the results.

Given that we're only using this repo for our own internal cookbooks which are too specific to be of any use to anyone else (even if Legal would allow us to share them), what are the pros/cons of this approach? It seems like we would lower git contention between members of our team if we broke them out into different repos, but I'm not sure how we would then refactor the CI jobs. One thing I like about this approach as that the only thing we have to do in regards to CI is just to add the new cookbook to the Berksfile and it just works. If we set up Bamboo to monitor multiple repos, that increases the chance that someone will add a new cookbook and forget to monitor that new repo in both Bamboo jobs (pushing and linting). Not to mention that it complicates the jobs themselves which now have to pull in multiple repos-- Berks will handle that fine, but knife cookbook test will need them all checked out to execute, as will foodcritic/rubocop on the linting side, and I definitely like the acceptance criteria of passing knife before being pushed with berks. I don't like the thought of pushing it up to the chef server with potentially broken ruby code.

Now, we could do per-repo Rakefile/Berksfile setups, but that increases the overhead of setting up a new cookbook. And the idea of having 20+ jobs in Bamboo, each for their own cookbook, seems wrong to me.

Thoughts?

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On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 2:46 PM, Pete Cheslock < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Just like the choice between using which configuration management.  My vote is to pick one and go.  Starting with a single repo is the easiest to get started for beginners.  And as you scale you can split out into separate cookbooks.  

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 5:36 PM, Booker Bense < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I doubt there's a hard and fast rule to apply to all situations, but there has been a lot of experience with using a single repo for the entire set of chef cookbooks. That was more or less the default recommendation 3 years ago. Almost everyone that started there has changed to a repo per cookbook. 

At this point I think you have to have a really strong reason not to use a repo per cookbook. Or at least a repo per cookbook suite ( a set of related cookbooks that have interdependencies. )

Having a separate repo for each cookbook will make automated testing easier and it also imposes some discipline on creating dependencies. Automated config management is a powerful amplifier, but unfortunately it amplifies stupid just

as fast as clever. The more testing you do the better, and at this point the tools are there to make TDD part of your Chef

workflow. 

- Booker C. Bense 

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Alex Myasnikov < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Ohai Chefs,

 

I am trying to understand what advantages (and disadvantages if any?) are there in having a git repo per each cookbook in the chef-repo as opposed to having all of one’s application cookbooks in a single git repo.

 

Up to this point I was thinking of a single repo containing all cookbooks (minus community ones managed by Berkshelf), however I came across a few references (below) that mentioned having git repo per cookbook. It seems like the latter helps CI, but I am not sure how exactly and what tangible benefits are there and what potential tradeoffs are. Is having a repo per each cookbook that’s developed constitutes a best practice?

 

First reference is from last year’s ChefConf presentation in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipSudpDYhTM  (Slide depicting master repo consisting of individual repos per cookbook)

 

And then Nathen Harvey’s blog post on MVT had this snippet:

1. gem install foodcritic
2. Go to Travis CI and follow the Sign In link at the top.
3. Activate the GitHub Service Hook for your cookbook’s repository from your TravisCI profile page. Each of your cookbooks has its own repository, right?!

http://technology.customink.com/blog/2012/06/04/mvt-foodcritic-and-travis-ci/

 

Setup:

 

Chef Server 11

Berkshelf 2.X

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Alex