Pyronfan

Pyronfan helps you to manage your cluster by configuring it using Chef Server. It was inspired the Ironfan Ruby project, and uses Fabric to manage the common Chef tasks (e.g. bootstrap).

Setup

Pyronfan requires Fabric 1.4.1 or later, PyChef 0.2.1 and PyYAML library. To install them, type:

pip install -r requires.txt

Getting Started

First, you need to create a new cluster definition and place it in the Pyronfan root folder (the same level that fabfile.py).

Look the example bellow for a cluster web (YAML format):

name: webcluster
cloud:
  name: ec2
  user: ubuntu

environment: production

roles:
  - base

facets:
  - name: lb
    instances:
      - 10.0.0.1
    roles:
      - haproxy

  - name: webnode
    instances:
      0: 10.0.0.2
      1: 10.0.0.3
    roles:
      - nginx

Then, test the cluster file:

$ fab cluster:webcluster test

This will look for the webcluster.yml file on the current directory.

Using Pyronfan

Here you can see the common tasks that you can run with the Pyronfan to manage your cluster.

bootstrap

A bootstrap is a process that installs the chef-client on a target system so that it can run as a chef-client and communicate with a server.

$ fab cluster:webcluster bootstrap

This will execute the command knife bootstrap for all servers in the cluster file. Also, you can run it for a subset passing a pattern:

$ fab cluster:webcluster bootstrap:webcluster-lb-0

to execute bootstrap only for one server or all servers in the facet:

$ fab cluster:webcluster bootstrap:webcluster-webnode

kick

Execute chef-client for a specific host (or more cluster instances).

$ fab cluster:webcluster kick:webcluster-webnode-0

kill

Destroy the cluster: removes all node and client entries on the Chef Server.

$ fab cluster:webcluster kill

This will not destroy the cloud instances.

sync

Synchronize the local configuration with the Chef Server.

$ fab cluster:webcluster sync

Attention: turn off the chef-client service on the remote host before run sync, since chef-client send back your configuration to the server on the end of the cycle.