Pivotal Workstation: A Repeatable, Documented, Decomposable, Shareable and Iterative OSX (ruby) Development Environment
Development environments are very personal, yet pairing requires some standard be agreed upon. Traditionally, Pivotal relied on imaging workstations from a gold master image which was updated as time allowed. Creating an image that satisfies everyone is impossible, and creating one that satisfies most people is a time consuming process which happened when Apple happened to release hardware which was not compatible with the old image. Chef and the Pivotal Workstation cookbook allows bringing up a new rails development environment with almost no effort, decide on standards on a per-project basis, then share changes with the rest of the users of the pivotal_workstation cookbook as time goes on. Another motivation was to reduce the amount of time spent at standup discussing how to get xyz to compile/run/launch/work in development.
It might be, but it's probably not. Have you ever spent hours trying to get the mysql gem to compile? Do you go to RVM's home page to figure out how to install it? What about homebrew? Do you not test SSL on your local machine because getting nginx set up with a self signed certificate would take most of the morning? Do you fear setting up a new machine because you'll spend a week running into things you vaguely remember how to fix?
Anything you want, nothing you don't. Packages are built with Homebrew, Ruby is installed with RVM. See the recipes folder for a complete list. Many recipes require homebrew or overwriting your .bash_profile. If you want something that doesn't have a recipe, write one and make a pull request.
Yes. Chef needs to be run as root - it can do whatever it wants to your system. The recipes have to make some hard assumptions about your machine, and take over parts of your system. Reading any recipe you're thinking of using is a very good idea - a chef recipe shouldn't be difficult to follow, and it'll give you an idea of how to make your own. In the case of your bash profile, it'll be backed up by chef (to /var/chef/backup), and you can move it into ~/.bash_profile_includes/ and it will be sourced by the provided .bash_profile.
Soloist is a simple tool to get started quickly with chef-solo and was written initially to make using the pivotal_workstation cookbook easy. The pivotal_workstation cookbook and soloist were both extracted from wschef, the precursor to this effort. Aside from chef-solo, you'll only need xcode installed.
Soloist (or your preferred method of running chef) usually runs chef-solo as root. This means the current user is root, and ~ will be expanded to root's home directory. Some constants, WS_USER and WS_HOME are available when needed.
Yes. At Pivotal we take testing seriously, and have all projects under CI. Chef recipes for OSX didn't fit into any existing CI solution, so pivotal_workstation got its own which builds most of the recipes every night and on every check in.
Pull requests are welcomed. Creating a cookbook to keep along side pivotal_workstation allows for easy separation between personal/project metadata/recipes and recipes that are of general utility.
It's something we're considering, but it doesn't exist yet. It'll probably show up over at pivotal_experimental first.
pivotal_workstation started as a side project of Matthew Kocher and Steve Conover of Pivotal Labs in 2009, and made the move to a supported pivotal project at the beginning of 2010.