Using Chef-Solo to deploy a Steelmesh instance on ubuntu 12.04

Enable passwordless sudo for your chosen user on your server

visudo
<username here> ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

Ensure deploy.sh is executable

chmod a+X deploy.sh

Execute as follows

./deploy.sh user@server

Use steelmesh

Local steelmesh development via Virtual machines

To test on local virtual machines we will use a few tools to make this process as painless as possible once setup. They are:

• VirtualBox
• VeeWee
• Vagrant

A short summary of the above tools for the unintiated. VirtualBox is an open source virtualization platform from Oracle, of which VeeWee and Vagrant are wholely dependant on. VeeWee is a tool facilitating the easy setup of a virtual machine for Vagrant to use in its magic and Vagrant allows for the rapid setup and destruction of a virtual machine.

Installing VeeWee

You can view the official installation documentation at github. Also worth a note is Vagrant is installed as a dependancy of VeeWee.

Make sure you have ruby 1.9.2 installed.
Install bundler

gem install bundler

Clone the repo

git clone git://github.com/jedi4ever/veewee.git

Install VeeWee

cd veewee
bundle install

Now, you may at this point have to build the gem to get this to work (I did) so do the following

gem build veewee.gemspec
gem install <whateverwascreated>.gem

Using VeeWee and Vagrant

Define your template. This will use the ubuntu-12.04-server-amd64 template to define tge vagrant template "precise64". You can change that to whatever you like. During the build step veewee will go out and fetch all the bits needed such as the .iso file.

veewee vbox define 'precise64' 'ubuntu-12.04-server-amd64'
veewee vbox build 'precise64'

Now VeeWee has done its thing and created a "basebox" ideally you would like to make that portable, so we use Vagrant to package it up like so:

vagrant basebox export

Once that is done import it into Vagrant. This will allow us to use this "basebox" on any Vagrant controlled vm we want.

vagrant box add "pecise64" package.box

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Controlling the virtual machine

Now using the included vagrant file, we can bring the steelmesh virtual machine online by one simple command.

vagrant up

To shut it down use

vagrant halt

and to destory it

vagrant destory

ssh into it

vagrant ssh

There are some other things you can do with vagrant but that should be enough for starters

Don't worry about destorying the box if you have seriously broken something on it, calling vagrant up will do a clean build of the box from the included chef cookbooks.

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Steelmesh and Vagrant info

The following is the port forwarding information for the machine, on the left is what it will appear to you on your machine and the right what it is actually on the vm

8080 -> 80
5985 -> 5984 (couchdb)
3275 -> 3274 (steelmesh dashboard)
6634 -> 6633 (steelmesh port)

Because of the way the networking is done using vagrant navigating to say http://localhost:8080 on your machine will actually be port 80 on the vm and so forth...

Blatant Theft Accreditation

The bash scripts for installing Chef-Solo onto a virtual machine were stolen from pferdefleisch, which originally came from this blog post