[chef] Re: PolicyFile and alternative sources

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Wednesday, July 8, 2015 at 8:04 AM, Phil Oliva wrote:

> Ohai Chefs,
>  
> I am currently reviewing 
> https://github.com/chef/chef-dk/blob/master/POLICYFILE_README.md as seems ;
> policyfile feature has been moving forward the last few months.
>  
> Under specifying alternative sources it says “ChefDK can fetch cookbooks 
> from Supermarket, git, and local disk (other sources will be added in the 
> future)“.
>  
> However the examples only show  
> cookbook 'my_app', path: 'cookbooks/my_app'
> cookbook 'mysql', github: 'opscode-cookbooks/mysql', branch: 'master'

This is good feedback. I will add examples for these. I also want to move the 
documentation to the main Chef Docs site soon, as the feature is mature 
enough to be documented there.
  
>  
> I am wondering if you currently able to resolve from git location not on 
> github. Can an internal gitlab location be used?

The syntax for that is:

cookbook "foo", git: "git://example.com:me/foo-cookbook.git”

> Also if you have an internal supermarket or minimart site can they be used 
> as a policyfile source?
You should be able to use an internal supermarket as the default source, the 
syntax for that would be:

default_source :community, “https://your-supermarket.example”

At the moment you may only have one default source, so every cookbook you 
want to use (that isn’t otherwise coming from a git repo or local path) would 
need to be mirrored there. I’m now working on allowing multiple default 
sources, though one caveat will be that cookbooks can only exist in one 
default source or the other, unless you explicitly say where you want the 
cookbook to be fetched from.

Also, at the time that code was written, supermarket was just getting going, 
but now everyone calls it supermarket, so I’m adding that as an alias, e.g.,

default_source :supermarket, “URL”

If you want to get just one or a few cookbooks from your private supermarket, 
but the rest from the public supermarket, I think this is possible with the 
code as written now, but I don’t have any testing around it and I think the 
syntax would be weird. If you need this specific feature, let me know and 
I’ll look into it.
  
>  
>  
> If this is possible any examples would be great.
>  
> -Phil
>  
> Philip Oliva
> Senior Infrastructure Software Developer
> BlackBerry Ltd.
> “Fail quick, fail often, recover quickly”
> http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/philip-oliva/67/74/10

One final note, policyfiles are getting mature quite quickly now, but you 
might need to stick with the latest versions of Chef, Chef Server, and ChefDK 
for the next few months for everything to work well. For example, the 
upcoming ChefDK 0.7 has a command to show all your policy revisions and 
policy groups, but it requires Chef Server 12.1. We have some things planned 
(in particular, adding policyfile stuff to the node object) that you will 
only be able to use if you upgrade Chef Client and Chef Server together. That 
said, if you are happy with the way it works now, you should be able to 
upgrade the different components individually without problem.
  
--  
Daniel DeLeo