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

[Tara Robertson]

Thanks James that's a really helpful explanation. Is Sitka using any
of these tools in production?

Cheers,
Tara

sent by magic!

On 2012-10-27, at 6:42 PM, James Fournie <james.fournie at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>