[chef] Bridging the gap between node and artifact

[Danny Hadley < >]

Hey guys,

I have been using chef for around a year now and I'm having a bit of trouble
bridging one last piece of the automation puzzle with a chef workflow; getting
a specific commit (i.e a feature branch I want to deploy to staging) deployed
onto a node using chef. 

For time purposes, lets say my deployment procedure is to simply download and
unpack a tarball into the doc root of a web server, and lets also say that the
installation of that webserver on the node is taken care of in a different
recipe. So, my "zz" cookbook has two recipes:

zz::server
zz::application

where the application recipe looks like

tarball "/http/public" do
  source "http://my-artifact-server/zz.tar.gz";
end

what is the best way of handling that situation I mentioned where I want a
feature branch (a specific commit), rather that the master/prod release that 
is
most likely the file downloaded by "http://my-artifact-server/zz.tar.gz"? Lets
say my CI pipeline has the ability to build upon push, and the commit hash is
12a4, so I do have an artifact for the 12a4 build. I was thinking that one
solution would be to have the chef "tarball" resource download it's file from 
a
url like:

"http://my-artifact-server/zz?nn=#{node.node_name}";

where the "nn" param is the node name. This way, the responsibility relies on
the artifact server to serve up the correct artifact and chef needs only have
one version of the recipe. I'm not sure that tool exists though, and it seems
like a tool that would need to be in cahootz with chef since the node would
have configuration properties stored in multiple places.

Anyways, does this make sense to anyone, has anyone else faced these growing
pains, and if so, how did you go about solving them?

Thanks!
-Danny