Getting started with chef, and running composer install on deploy

Question

We're looking to deploy a few Laravel4 based PHP apps on amazon with OpsWorks, this requires a few things:

• Grab code from git
• Download composer.phar from getcomposer.com
• Run php composer.phar install
• Change permissions on a few specific folders

I'm completely fresh with it comes to chef, so initially looking for a place to get to grips with the basics of chef, and then how to achieve the tasks above, would appreciate any pointers.

Answer 1

I'm no Chef guru (I usually use Puppet) but try the following:

Grab code from git

You may want to execute a wget command (see examples below).

If you want something more sophisticated see http://docs.opscode.com/resource_deploy.html

deploy_revision "/path/to/application" do
  repo 'ssh://name-of-git-repo/repos/repo.git'
  migrate false
  purge_before_symlink %w{one two folder/three}
  create_dirs_before_symlink []
  symlinks(
    "one"   => "one",
    "two"   => "two",
    "three" => "folder/three"
  )
  before_restart do
    # some Ruby code
  end
  notifies :restart, "service[foo]"
  notifies :restart, "service[bar]"
end

Download composer.phar from getcomposer.com

I would execute a wget.

I lifted some code from here: http://cookingclouds.com/2012/06/23/chef-simple-cookbook-example/

It's basically just doing a wget in a specific folder, extracting the contents of the tar & updating some permissions on the new files. It only does this if the folder doesn't already exist.

# Run a bash shell -  download and extract composer
bash "install_composer" do
     user "root"
     cwd "/folder/to/extact/to"
     code <<-EOH
       wget http://getcomposer.com/composer.tar.gz
       tar -xzf composer.tar.gz
       chown -R user:group /folder/to/extact/to
     EOH
     not_if "test -d /folder/to/extact/to"
end

Run php composer.phar install

http://docs.opscode.com/resource_execute.html

execute "composer install" do
  command "php composer.phar install && touch /var/log/.php_composer_installed"
  creates "/var/log/.php_composer_installed"
  action :run
end

This will only run it once, otherwise you can remove the "creates" and it will run it each time.

Change permissions on a few specific folders

http://docs.opscode.com/resource.html

directory "/tmp/folder" do
  owner "root"
  group "root"
  mode 0755
  action :create
end

If the directory already exists, nothing will happen. If the directory was changed in any way, the resource is marked as updated.

Finally

I find the search handy, browsing stuff on the Chef site seems to be hopeless (too much stuff to dig through). http://docs.opscode.com/search.html

Answer 2

I would go pretty much with Drew Khoury's answer, with one change. To download compose.phar, you can use the remote_file resource instead of doing a wget in a bash script.