Provisioning Vagrant w/ Chef

Question

I'm digging into what it will take to migrate my development environments to Vagrant and I'm having some trouble getting a handle on the VM provisioning process with chef. I've never used chef before and the Vagrant docs in this area intentionally weak (out of scope) so I could use a hand.

I'd like to make this as portable as possible, so I thought it made sense to load cookbooks from a URL so this is what I'm trying in my Vagrantfile:

config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|     chef.recipe_url = 'https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks/tarball/master'     chef.add_recipe 'nginx'     chef.add_recipe 'mysql'     chef.add_role 'web'      # You may also specify custom JSON attributes:     # chef.json = { :mysql_password => '' } end 

I don't think that there's any question that I'm simply misunderstanding something, but I haven't found a documentation source that seems like it fits this Vagrant context.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The way you show above will certainly work fine.

However, if you're going to use Chef solo, I recommend embedding the cookbooks directly within the repository that goes into version control. This makes it so that at every point in time when you commit, the Vagrantfile is aligned with the proper versions of cookbooks. So in 2 years when you check out code from today, the cookbooks should still technically work.

If you want to go this route, create a directory, such as cookbooks, which contains the cookbooks. Then configure Vagrant like so:

config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|     chef.cookbooks_path = "cookbooks"     chef.add_recipe 'nginx'     chef.add_recipe 'mysql'     chef.add_role 'web'      # You may also specify custom JSON attributes:     # chef.json = { :mysql_password => '' } end 

Answer 2

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of documentation on Vagrant in combination with Chef. I recommend having a look into using librarian to manage your cookbooks for you. I typically have a block similar to this in my Vagrantfile:

config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|   chef.cookbooks_path = "chef/cookbooks"   chef.roles_path     = "chef/roles"    # ... end 

I create a new directory in the root of my project called chef and add the following lines to my .gitignore:

# Ignore librarian bundled cookbooks and cache /chef/cookbooks /chef/tmp 

In the chef directory, you can run librarian-chef init and begin adding cookbooks to the created Cheffile in a way you would with a Gemfile:

cookbook "apt",   :git => "git://github.com/fnichol/chef-apt.git",   :ref => "cacher-client-solo-support"  cookbook "imagemagick", "0.2.2"  cookbook "mongodb",   :git => "git://github.com/edelight/chef-cookbooks.git",   :ref => "0.11.0" 

You get the benefits of being able to specify git repositories, file paths, and versions to bundle which is extremely helpful when you're using cookbooks from multiple sources. When you run librarian-chef install librarian will fetch all of the specified cookbooks and store them in the cookbooks directory, relative to the location of your Cheffile.