[chef] chef-provisioning / knife-zero

[Roland Moriz < >]

Hi everyone!

I'm currently maintaining a couple of small (<25 nodes) knife-solo[1] and 
knife-zero[2] setups. 

Typically the setups are too small to run a traditional chef-server setup, 
also the owners don't want to rely on third party services (data protection, 
latency) - so hosted chef is not a solution. 

Recently I've re-evaluated the current state of chef-provisioning and it 
looks way better than a couple of months ago. However I'm not sure how this 
is meant to replace the "knife-*" solutions out there: While setting up a 
couple of machines with attributes/run-list is very nice using the 
Chef-Provisioning Chef-DSL, my customers usually don't want to (re-)converge 
*all* nodes but run chef-client explicitly on one (or more) nodes.

Example provisioning recipe: 
https://gist.github.com/rmoriz/f293ca1402591c5469ae

I can run "bundle exec chef-client -z provisioning/test.rb" and the instances 
will be provisioned, bootstrapped and converged. awesome!
But how do I later use chef-zero to converge e.g. *only* the nginx node? When 
I re-run the recipe, all nodes will be converged.

As far as I understand, I could add some attributes or even (ab)use local 
environment variables to execute only specific resources of the 
chef-provisinioning cookbook, but I'm sure this is not the right way to do 
it, right?

A "one node per recipe"-approach seems to be very non-DRY to me and breaks 
all the nice "10.times do |i| … end" examples to create a bunch of identical 
nodes.

I'm missing something like knife-zero in the mix, unfortunately it currently 
use a different port for knife-zero forwarding which currently makes it 
incompatible.

Any hints? Thanks :)

best regards
Roland

[1] https://github.com/matschaffer/knife-solo
[2] https://github.com/higanworks/knife-zero

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