Episode 9: Chefconf With Jesse Robbins and Mandi Walls

In the News:

• Jeremiah Snapp created a chef-repo and wiki on github that aim to Demonstrate the Power of Chef, Librarian and Vagrant.
• Bryan McLellan @btmspox announced on the chef mailing list the timeline for Chef 0.10.10. Today, April 23, is the day that Opscode will review the remaining patches for Chef and “feature freeze.” The first release candidate should be out by the end of the week.
• Ranjib Dey recently added an article to his blog titled “Chef:: Maintaining the shape” - It’s a collection of 7 things that Ranjib is trying out to keep his chef code base in shape.
• Andrew Crump is extending David Calavera’s “minitest-chef-handlerproject with support for MiniTest::Spec and other goodness to make testing cookbooks awesome. He’s looking for feedback so please a look if testing cookbooks is something you’re interested in The “example-tests” are a good place to start.
• One thing that can be easy to forget when working with Chef is the correct knife syntax for uploading a cookbook, role, data bag, or environment to the Chef server. I wonder if there’s a ticket for this in Opscode’s Jira? Sometimes, I just knife would do what I mean. Well, Maciej (The emphasis is on ‘ma’: MA-chay) Pasternacki (Paster-not-ski) @mpasternacki recently released a Knife plugin that will help! knife-dwim Just gem install knife-dwim and use knife dwim path/to/file and the item will be uploaded to your Chef server correctly!
• Bryan Berry @bryanwb wrote an article on the data.fao.org blog titled “Managing data.fao.org with Chef” - This article explores some of the reasons why Chef was chosen after working with custom bash and perl scripts and puppet. It’s a well written article that gives a nice introduction to some of the features of Chef, specifically how to use Chef with java application stacks.
• Matt Ray @mattray was at the OpenStack Design Summit & Conference last week and gave a presentation titled “OpenStack Deployments with Chef”. He discussed what Chef does, why it works well for OpenStack and the current state of Chef cookbooks for OpenStack. There’s also a few slides discussing the roadmaps for OpenStack cookbooks, knife-openstack, Chef and Opscode’s plans around OpenStack. Hopefully we’ll have video to link to soon!
• Book publisher O’Reilly has a link up for Stephen Nelson-Smith’s @lordcope “Chef: The Definitive Guide” and lists a release date of September 2012. Estimated at 400 pages, I know this is a book a lot of people have really been looking forward to!

Cookbook Updates

ark v0.0.1 - jtimberman

• Joshua Timberman @jtimberman, Bryan Berry @bryanwb
• new version w/ put, dump, cherry_pick, install, and build_with_make_install actions

mosh v0.2.0 - jtimberman

• Joshua Timberman
• Installs/Configures mosh
• apt cookbook as a dependency (LWRP is used in package recipe)
• move bash resource above remote_file
• ‘tar’ missing in url attribute
• package dependencies for building from source
• freebsd has a mosh package now, default to that

gem_installer v0.1.1 - chrisroberts

• Chris Roberts
• Simple cookbook for managing gem versions on a node.
• Removes builtin BagConfig support
• Allows gems to be specified in Array or Hash form

gitpaste v0.0.3 - chrisroberts

• Installs and configures gitpaste pastebin app
• GitPaste is a GitHub Gist clone that allows you to deploy and create your own gist.github.com-like application. It is useful in an environment where you may not be able to use gist.github.com or alternatives.

chef_gem v0.0.1 - chrisroberts

• Chirs Roberts
• This is a temporary compat cookbook that provides the chef_gem resource to recipes on chef versions <= 0.10.8. The intended purpose is to allow proper omnibus usage of embedded gem set until the 0.10.10 release is officially provided.

nginx_simplecgi v0.1.0 - chrisroberts

• Chirs Roberts
• Provides SimpleCGI for NGINX. This was cookbook was born out of the work done for COOK-1206 - Add NGINX support to nagios.

bag_config v2.0.0 - chrisroberts

• Chirs Roberts
• We’ve mentioned the bag_config cookbook on What’s Cookin’ before. It provides a clean way to override node attributes with values from a databag.
• The latest changes force hash type on encrypted bag items

web v0.0.1 - melezhik

• Alex Melezhik
• A simple light weight resource for deploying web sites into a directory. It will fetch and unpack a tarball then create a symlink to the upacked directory.

openvas v0.0.30 - jackl0phty

• Gerald Hevener @jackl0phty
• Install and configure OpenVAS ( Open Vulenability Assessment System ); a fork of the Nessus project.
• This iniital release could use some help and Redhat support, why not help Gerald out?

perlbrew v0.1.0 - xdg

• David Golden @xdg
• Installs perlbrew and provides resource/provider types for managing perls with perlbrew.
• To date, this cookbook has only been designed and tested on the Ubuntu and Debian platforms.

carton v0.1.0 - xdg

• David Golden @xdg
• This LWRP sets up a carton application as a runit service and passes through runit commands to start/stop or otherwise control the service.
• carton is a Perl dependency manage (aka Bundler for Perl)

linode v1.0.5 - cap10morgan

• Wes Morgan @wesmorgan
• Collection of useful recipes for setting up Linodes

users_solo v1.0.2 - rgaiser

• Roberto Gaiser @rgaiser
• Creates users from a databag using chef-solo
• To use data bags with chef-solo, you have to load them from a file in Chef 0.10.4 and higher
• http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Data+Bags#DataBags-UsingDataBagswithChefSolo

minitest-handler v0.0.5 - btm

• Bryan McLellan @btmspox
• Installs and configures minitest-chef-handler
• use minitest-chef-handler gem
• Remove old tests

skype v0.0.1 - aruntomar

• Arun Tomar @aruntomar
• This cookbook will install and configure skype on redhat & centos OS.

campfire v0.0.3 - cwjohnston

• Cameron Johnston @cwjohnston
• This cookbook provides a campfire_msg resource, making it easier for chef recipies to play sounds or send messages to a chat room on the 37signals Campfire service. https://github.com/cwjohnston/chef-campfire

Eric G. Wolfe’s changes

• nfs v0.1.0
• vnc v0.0.1
• iscsi v0.0.5
• multipath v0.0.5
• oracle v0.0.9
• el-sysctl v0.0.6
• gnome v0.0.2
• x-windows v0.0.2
• snmp v0.2.1
• yumrepo v0.15.4
• dbench v0.0.7
• certificate v0.0.4
• krb5 v0.0.6