Overview

This project contains everything needed to build, test and deploy Sidewinder Labs applications.

Vagrant

First, install Chef, VirtualBox and Vagrant.

To launch a VM that contains a local ElasticSearch server, navigate to the vagrant directory and run:

vagrant up es_server

The first time this is run it will take some time, since Vagrant needs to download a base instance of Debian (what they call a 'box'). Once this has been downloaded it will be kept for future use when building new VMs.

Once the entire process has completed, it will be possible to connect to the VM using SSH. To do this use the Vagrant ssh command:

vagrant ssh es_server

To connect to the end-point that was created use the following IP address and port number:

33.33.33.12:9200

The VM can be suspended using:

vagrant suspend es_server

See the Vagrant commands reference for more on what you can do with the VM.

Deploying to a remote server

If the server was not launched with the bootstap script then bootstrap it as follows (this only needs to be done once):

cd vagrant
scp ../vagrant-ec2/bootstrap.sh <your-server>:
ssh <your-server> "sudo ~/bootstrap.sh"

Now the server can be updated with:

../vagrant-ec2/setup.sh <your-server> data_server

Deploying different versions of the code

If you're not familiar with Chef's layout, the key things you'll probably want to change whilst developing are the revisions to be used when obtaining code from GitHub (defined in site-cookbooks/misc/attributes/default.rb), and the actual repos to use so that you can refer to your own forks (defined in site-cookbooks/misc/recipes/default.rb). The latter will be parameterised at some point soon, by having an entry in the attributes settings.

If you update either of these files to point to one of your code branches, you can get Vagrant to re-run the whole Chef sequence by exiting your SSH session, and then running:

vagrant provision ui_server

or:

vagrant reload ui_server

See the Vagrant commands reference for the difference between these two commands.

The remaining document is the standard Chef documentation.

Chef Repositories

Every Chef installation needs a Chef Repository. This is the place where cookbooks, roles, config files and other artifacts for managing systems with Chef will live. We strongly recommend storing this repository in a version control system such as Git and treat it like source code.

While we prefer Git, and make this repository available via GitHub, you are welcome to download a tar or zip archive and use your favorite version control system to manage the code.

Repository Directories

This repository contains several directories, and each directory contains a README file that describes what it is for in greater detail, and how to use it for managing your systems with Chef.

• certificates/ - SSL certificates generated by rake ssl_cert live here.
• config/ - Contains the Rake configuration file, rake.rb.
• cookbooks/ - Cookbooks you download or create.
• data_bags/ - Store data bags and items in .json in the repository.
• roles/ - Store roles in .rb or .json in the repository.

Rake Tasks

The repository contains a Rakefile that includes tasks that are installed with the Chef libraries. To view the tasks available with in the repository with a brief description, run rake -T.

The default task (default) is run when executing rake with no arguments. It will call the task test_cookbooks.

The following tasks are not directly replaced by knife sub-commands.

• bundle_cookbook[cookbook] - Creates cookbook tarballs in the pkgs/ dir.
• install - Calls update, roles and upload_cookbooks Rake tasks.
• ssl_cert - Create self-signed SSL certificates in certificates/ dir.
• update - Update the repository from source control server, understands git and svn.

The following tasks duplicate functionality from knife and may be removed in a future version of Chef.

• metadata - replaced by knife cookbook metadata -a.
• new_cookbook - replaced by knife cookbook create.
• role[role_name] - replaced by knife role from file.
• roles - iterates over the roles and uploads with knife role from file.
• test_cookbooks - replaced by knife cookbook test -a.
• test_cookbook[cookbook] - replaced by knife cookbook test COOKBOOK.
• upload_cookbooks - replaced by knife cookbook upload -a.
• upload_cookbook[cookbook] - replaced by knife cookbook upload COOKBOOK.

Configuration

The repository uses two configuration files.

• config/rake.rb
• .chef/knife.rb

The first, config/rake.rb configures the Rakefile in two sections.

• Constants used in the ssl_cert task for creating the certificates.
• Constants that set the directory locations used in various tasks.

If you use the ssl_cert task, change the values in the config/rake.rb file appropriately. These values were also used in the new_cookbook task, but that task is replaced by the knife cookbook create command which can be configured below.

The second config file, .chef/knife.rb is a repository specific configuration file for knife. If you're using the Opscode Platform, you can download one for your organization from the management console. If you're using the Open Source Chef Server, you can generate a new one with knife configure. For more information about configuring Knife, see the Knife documentation.

http://help.opscode.com/faqs/chefbasics/knife

Next Steps

Read the README file in each of the subdirectories for more information about what goes in those directories.