Chopped

knife-solo kitchen for deploying fun servers.

Intended roles

• Factorio host. Would be best with an HTTP API to control the Factorio game instance. Should support generating new saves, listing saves, changing the active save, managing save backups (autosaves), etc. Ubuntu-based service descriptions exist in the wild for Factorio, but are shitty (eg using screen for persistance and daemonization)

  • why not just use the existing chef cookbook? Because it's running Factorio, an untrusted C++ binary network service, as root. Unacceptable if we are putting this server on the general internet.

• Minecraft host. ????. I don't care how it works, but it should be chef configurable :)

• Slackbots host. This will need nodejs_service definition so we can add a bunch of different slackbots or whatnot.

Design

This is my first time chef-ing from scratch, and the ecosystem is baroque to say the least. I'm vaguely following the approach in these articles:

• repo setup follows http://www.markjberger.com/an-introduction-to-chef-solo/
• vagrant configuration and philosophy follows http://www.talkingquickly.co.uk/2013/10/using-vagrant-to-test-chef-cookbooks/

I want to use runit for service definition and management -- I use it at home and at work, and I appreciate its design.

How to get going

One-time setup:

I suggest creating a new RVM or rbenv context with ruby 2.x for use with this project. I did rbenv install 2.2.3 and then rbenv local 2.2.3 to use ruby 2.2.3 for this.

Perform this one-time setup:

1. bundle install
2. bundle exec berks install
3. Start up a node in AWS. There are plugins to do this magically, but :meh:, you might have to create some keys & stuff, so just do this by hand. Confirm that you can login with ssh ubuntu@12.34.56.78 -i ~/.ssh/leroy_jenkins.pem.
4. While that is starting up, go into data_bags/users/ and create yourself a file, because you'll want to be able to SSH into this box once it's provisioned. Probably.
5. bundle exec knife solo prepare ubuntu@12.34.56.78 -i ~/.ssh/leroy_jenkins.pem This will load all the chef stuff onto it, and give you a file nodes/12.34.56.78.json.

B-b-b-but... Vagrant?

Instead of starting up a node on AWS, do this:

1. vagrant up
2. bundle exec knife solo prepare vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2222 -i ./.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key prepares your Vagrant machine for knife-solo development by setting up chef on it.
3. Run vagrant snapshot save chef. If your VM ever becomes inaccessable due to bad chef changes, you can always run vagrant snapshot restore chef to reset it to this known-good state.

Your file created will be nodes/127.0.0.1.

Creating a cookbook

Put cookbooks in the site-cookbooks folder. cookbooks folder is reserved for upstream dependencies.

knife cookbook create -o site-cookbooks/ YOUR_NEW_COOKBOOK

GO GO GADGET COOKBOOK.

1. vi nodes/12.34.56.78.json and add roles to the run_list. These are the recipes that your box will run, e.g. ["recipe[base]","recipe[factorio]","recipe[factorio::api","recipe[chopped_nginx"].
2. bundle exec knife solo cook ubuntu@12.34.56.78 -i ~/.ssh/leroy_jenkins.pem and chef will go off and run all of the cheffy stuff.

On future runs you should be using your own user account to cook and clean the box, since the vagrant user may no longer be allowed to SSH.

Testing chef in Vagrant

Then, you can provision your own box using knife solo to test out this chef repo. I haven't done this yet.

Useful tips

Put 127.0.0.1 vagrant-box to your /etc/hosts file, and a section like this to your SSH config:

Host vagrant-box
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  Port 222

This makes later access via your user ssh leroy_jenkins@vagrant-box or bundle exec knife solo prepare leroy_jenkins@vagrant-box instead of needing to manually specify the port.