It’s been a year since the Opscode Cookbook site was launched and a recent project got me thinking about what parts of my hopes that I wrote about then have taken effect so far. I recently heard that a major Chef user has switched to Ubuntu from another Linux distribution because that is what most of the cookbooks that Opscode maintains are written for and tested on. Choice of distribution is typically something that is very dear to administrators and somewhere in the world there is a flame war on this topic every second. Consequently, this is huge and I’ve been thinking about it for a while.

It is one thing for a company to choose a distribution based on a software package that is significant to them; in the past I have had to battle against stakeholders that wanted to choose a particular distribution solely on the availability of support. Chef runs on a lot of platforms, but of course some get much more attention than others because that is where the community is. But here we’re seeing a company choose their distribution not because of Chef’s support for it, but for the community support for Cookbooks that run on it. This is clear evidence that what I wrote about is starting to happen.

I’ve been working on a Chef + Cobbler writeup in my spare time. I went out the other day and bought a consumer desktop to use as a libvirt/kvm host for this project. It often tends to be least painful to use cloud resources, but sometimes that which is taken care of for you is too unknown, too much of a “black box,” and you need the deep visibility into your infrastructure that building it yourself provides. There is indication that some have gotten Cobbler running on and deploying Ubuntu, but it doesn’t appear to have taken hold. There’s a launchpad spec claiming there is a package, but I couldn’t find it. Another spec makes it clear that files for debian packaging from upstream are not finished. It is here that I first ran into problems. I couldn’t get the init.d scripts provided in the debian/ directory of the upstream repository to work. They clearly needed some help, and after spending some time on them it became clear that they’re untested templates created by debhelper.

My goal wasn’t to fix these init scripts, I just wanted to get the cobbler server running. Then I remembered that we had a great existing runit cookbook that I was familiar with. The API for the cookbook site has progressed since release. Unfortunately the documentation for the cookbook API is a little behind, but the new functionality has been built into knife, the command line tool that interacts with the Chef server or Opscode platform, as well as multiple cloud providers. From within my personal chef-repo, I ran:

knife cookbook site vendor runit

This downloaded the runit cookbook from the Cookbooks site into a branch in my chef-repo git repository, then merged it into my current branch, allowing me to track changes between my local copy and the upstream copy using git. Then I added a couple templates and a call to the runit_service definition to my cookbook:

templates/default/sv-cobbler-run.erb:

#!/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
exec 2>&1
exec /usr/bin/env cobblerd -F

templates/default/sv-cobbler-log-run.erb:

#!/bin/sh
exec svlogd -tt ./main

recipes/default.rb:

# SNIP
runit_service "cobbler"

And then cobblerd was running under runit. There’s beauty in being able to take something somewhat complex like runit, and make it easy. So easy, that I used it rather than fixing up an init script.

Then I found that cobbler wanted to called through apache as proxy. No problem though, I vendored the apache2 cookbook as well. I spent a few minutes determining that I needed a couple of Apache modules, as the Cobbler instructions are pretty centric to Redhat and I got the impression that they make assumptions about what that gives you. Then I used the apache2 cookbook to proxy cobbler by adding this to the top of my recipe:

recipes/default.rb:

include_recipe "apache2"
include_recipe "apache2::mod_proxy_http"
include_recipe "apache2::mod_python"

I had some permission problems with mod_proxy, again likely a difference between Redhat and Ubuntu, but it wasn’t out of my way to ship the apache config provided by upstream using Chef with a small modification:

<Proxy http://localhost:25151>
    AddDefaultCharset off
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Proxy>

I’ll write about the Cobbler cookbook more later. You can, of course, follow it on the Cookbook site in the interim. I want to emphasize how I used a single command to grab existing code and leverage it to make it easier for me to do what I was trying to do: get Cobbler running. The Cookbook site combined with the awesome Chef community made this possible. If you haven’t used the “cookbook site” subcommands in knife yet, take a moment to try them out.

$ knife cookbook site --help
Available cookbook site subcommands: (for details, knife SUB-COMMAND --help)

** COOKBOOK SITE COMMANDS **
knife cookbook site vendor COOKBOOK [VERSION] (options)
knife cookbook site show COOKBOOK [VERSION] (options)
knife cookbook site share COOKBOOK CATEGORY (options)
knife cookbook site search QUERY (options)
knife cookbook site list (options)
knife cookbook site download COOKBOOK [VERSION] (options)
knife cookbook site unshare COOKBOOK