chatsecure.org chef repo

Chef is way better than provisioning servers by hand.

Vagrant

Install Vagrant, VirtualBox, and then install these plugins.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-berkshelf

Then you should be able to bring up the VM:

$ vagrant up

Provision the current roles/recipes defined in the Vagrantfile:

$ vagrant provision

Other useful commands are vagrant destroy to destroy the VM, vagrant ssh to ssh into the VM, vagrant halt and vagrant suspend to halt/suspend. Sometimes you have to do vagrant reload as well when changing VM configuration.

Deploying

Install the latest version of Chef, knife-solo, and berkshelf for your operating system.

$ gem install chef knife-solo berkshelf

Install chef-solo on the remote server with knife-solo:

$ knife solo prepare [email protected]

Provision the server with the latest cookbooks (similar to vagrant provision):

$ knife solo cook [email protected]

Clean it up

$ knife solo clean [email protected]

Data Bags

The data_bags directory should look like this:

groups
    groups.json
secrets
    secrets.json
ssl
    certs.json
    keys.json
user-passwords
	passwords.json
users
    user1.json
    user2.json
    user3.json

Nodes

For some reason chef-solo breaks if you include too much stuff in your json file. In the nodes directory include a node example.com.json:

{
   "name": "example.com",
   "postgresql": {
      "password": {
         "postgres": "example_password"
      }
   },
   "run_list": [
      "role[nginx]",
      "role[base]",
      "role[security]",
      "role[users]",
      "role[web]"
   ]
}

Git Deploys

Now you can deploy application code with git:

$ git remote add vagrant ssh://[email protected]:2222/var/git/chatsecure-web.git
$ git remote add production [email protected]:/var/git/chatsecure-web.git
$ git push production master