[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] could Chef be used to install and maintain Evergreen?

[James Fournie]

I am sure you're not the only one so I hope maybe this will help:

Puppet and Chef are configuration management systems, both are written
in Ruby.  They allow you to define "rules" for setting
up/configuring/provisioning a system -- Puppet calls these "modules"
whereas Chef calls them "cookbooks".  Puppet modules use a custom
language to define how to set things up, whereas Chef cookbooks just
use pure Ruby.  Both of them are designed with having many different
servers with different roles (web, db) in multiple environments
(production, dev).

Vagrant is a tool which can use Puppet or Chef.  It allows you to
dynamically create a virtual machine for development, basically you
type a command and it automatically creates a VM using VirtualBox and
then uses Puppet or Chef to automatically install and set up whatever
software, say Evergreen, plus whatever development tools or
what-have-you that you may need.

~James

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 9:11 AM, Tara Robertson
<information.detective at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks James and Justin for replying.
>
> I don't get the differences between Puppet, Vagrant and Chef, but I'm OK
> with that (for now).
>
> Cheers,
> Tara
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 1:34 PM, James Fournie <james.fournie at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Tara,
>>
>> I started some cookbooks a long time ago for use with Vagrant
>> (vagrantup.com) but haven't updated it in quite a while, and basically
>> since then Vagrant gained support for Puppet so I was pondering
>> rewriting for Puppet.  Either way it's definitely possible to have
>> Chef provision an Evergreen server, just something that would need to
>> be explored more.
>>
>> https://github.com/jamesrf/evergreen-chef
>>
>>
>> ~James Fournie
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 9:23 AM, Justin Hopkins
>> <justin at mobiusconsortium.org> wrote:
>> > Great question Tara! I've been wanting to investigate Chef for quite a
>> > while, but haven't found the time.
>> >
>> > I'm not sure if you were at the Genesys (sp?) presentation at the last
>> > EG
>> > conference, but it's a Pines project with the same goal: to automate the
>> > deployment an EG cluster. I wonder if the Pines folks considered using
>> > Chef... Maybe they could compare/contrast the two tools.
>> >
>> > Justin
>> >
>> >
>> > On Mon Oct 22 16:16:36 2012, Tara Robertson wrote:
>> >>
>> >> I'm super energized and excited about a whole bunch of things after
>> >> attending the Access 2012 conference in Montreal. There was an awesome
>> >> session from Graham Stewart, Network and Storage Services Manager,
>> >> from the University of Toronto called Cooking with Chef at the U of T
>> >> Libraries: Automated Deployment of Web Applications in a Library
>> >> Context.
>> >>
>> >> He demoed Chef and ran a bunch of cookbooks to set up an instance of
>> >> Islandora while he was doing his talk. Here's the notes from his talk:
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1X-j0tEsm8jhGEGl7mp9BIu0XZZid0x4FX8gVWm9kC5w
>> >>
>> >> His talk got me wondering if it was possible to use Chef to install
>> >> and maintain instances of Evergreen. If someone were to write the
>> >> relevant cookbooks, then could they be reused by other people? I
>> >> suspect there's some things that would need tweaking (but with limited
>> >> knowledge I'm not sure what they would be).
>> >>
>> >> I chatted with Graham during the break. He was excited about the idea
>> >> of doing this with Evergreen and said that he'd be happy to answer any
>> >> questions:
>> >> graham.stewart at utoronto.ca <mailto:graham.stewart at utoronto.ca>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Chris Cormack shared this link Deploying Koha from git with Chef :
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> http://halcyoncorsair.tumblr.com/post/31841813338/deploying-koha-from-git-with-chef
>> >>
>> >> Would there be benefits to using Chef? How much of a pain would it be
>> >> to write the requisite cookbooks? Would new cookbooks need to be
>> >> written for each version of Evergreen? For each version of XULrunner,
>> >> Postgres and...?
>> >>
>> >> Cheers,
>> >> Tara
>
>