In my last blog entry, I demo’d how to get started with Vagrant and the ShellProvisioner. To further illustrate how amazingly simple it is to get started on some Ruby, I’ll convert the shell script from my last blog post to a little recipe for chef. Same objective, we install a PEAR package — but it could be anything really. Follow me. Shell This is the shell script from before:...
This is something experimental I have been working on for our chef deployments. So the objective was/is to find a sane way to install PEAR packages and install dependencies with composer. execute in chef recipes In chef recipes, almost everything is a resource. In case you’re just getting started with Chef, a list of current resources is available on the Opscode Wiki. It’s a link I put in my browser bar since I frequently work on chef recipes....
Ever since I started playing around with Unix ~13 years ago, I’ve been a fan of automating things. What started out as writing little (maybe pointless) shell scripts slowly but surely morphed into infrastructure automation today. As for my, or maybe anyone’s, motivation to do these things, I see three main factors: I’m easily bored — because repeating things is dull. I’m easily distracted (when I’m bored). I’m German: Of course we strive for perfection and excellence....
In 2010, operations became an even more central part of my life. As I write this blog post (in early January, 2011), we have been running on Amazon AWS — and EC2 in particular — for over a year. Previously we had used a service called RightScale but in Q3 of 2010, we moved on/away from RightScale and started using chef and a service called Scalarium. Because Opscode’s chef became such a big part of my work life, I gave a talk about chef, and chef-solo in particular, at last December’s PHP Usergroup meeting in Berlin....