Automate deployment using puppet

[tillmo]

No description provided.

[jamesaoverton]

We currently have an install script and deployment instructions. The shell script is a good start but it's designed to run just once. If it fails, or if we want to upgrade a system, then we're back to manual steps. The plan is to replace the script with one of the modern configuration management systems so that we can handle failures and updates more gracefully. This will also serve as detailed and up-to-date documentation of the deployment process.

I worked on this during the Hackathon (2014-03-29) and made a little progress. I'm using an official Ubuntu cloud image for Vagrant as the base. Vagrant automates the creation of a virtual machine inside VirtualBox and then calls Chef to install packages and configure the system. The Chef "recipes" developed for use with the virtual machine will work just as well to configure a cloud server or local machine.

I have Vagrant and Chef working. So far my Chef recipe just installs Hets, but I hope it will be straightforward to translate the rest of the install script into Chef instructions.

[tillmo]

Your plan sounds good! And indeed, the script has been pretty useless, because it nearly always fails. A Chef recipe (set) will be very valuable for the Ontohub community.

[tillmo]

@jamesaoverton , any progress on this? We currently want to set up Ontohub on a number of VMs and would have use for your Chef recipe.

[jamesaoverton]

Despite my best intentions, I haven't had any time to work on this. I'll pull together what I've got and send an update later today.

[tillmo]

many thanks