rails-app Cookbook

This is a cookbook that allows for plug-and-play creation of an application, using only a repository. The recipe takes care of creating the database, installing required gems via bundler, and creating an nginx stack to serve your site.

Requirements

This recipe has been tested on Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 14.04.

Attributes

rails-app::default attributes

Key	Type	Description	Default
["rails-app"]["name"]	String	Application name	"default"
["rails-app"]["address"]	String	IP address or domain name of the server.	node['fqdn']
["rails-app"]["action"]	String	What to do with the app, options are :deploy and :force_deploy, for more info see the chef application cookbook.	:deploy
["rails-app"]["path"]	String	Path where the application should be stored on the server.	"/opt/#{node["rails-app"]["name"]}"
["rails-app"]["deploy_key"]	String	An optional string if you wish to pull your code from a private repository, make sure to replace all newlines with \n if you use this.	nil
["rails-app"]["repository"]	String	Repository to pull your code from.	nil
["rails-app"]["revision"]	String	Revision of your code to pull.	"master"
["rails-app"]["environment"]	String	Rails environment to deploy.	"production"
["rails-app"]["db_host"]	String	Tells rails where the database is located.	"127.0.0.1"
["rails-app"]["db_adapter"]	String	Tells rails the database adapter to use.	"postgresql"
["rails-app"]["db_name"]	String	Tells rails the database to use.	"rails-app-#{default["rails-app"]["name"]}"
["rails-app"]["db_username"]	String	Tells rails who to login as.	node["rails-app"]["name"]
["rails-app"]["db_password"]	String	Tells rails the database password.	node["rails-app"]["db_password"] || ::SecureRandom.base64(24)
["rails-app"]["bundler"]	Boolean	Should I use bundler?	true
["rails-app"]["bundle_command"]	String	The path to bundler on your system.	"#{node["rbenv"]["root_path"]}/shims/bundle"
["rails-app"]["bundler_deployment"]	Boolean	Should bundler use deployment mode?	true
["rails-app"]["migrate"]	Boolean	Should the rails app have migrations run on it?	true
["rails-app"]["migration_command"]	String	What is the command to migrate the database?	"#{node["rails-app"]["bundle_command"]} exec rake db:migrate"
["rails-app"]["gems"]	Array	Additional gems to install with this recipe.	[]
["rails-app"]["bundler_without_groups"]	Array	What groups should bundler ignore?	[]
["rails-app"]["ssl"]	Boolean	Should I use SSL?	false
["rails-app"]["precompile_assets"]	Boolean	Shoudl assets be precompiled?	true
["rails-app"]["delete_before_bundle"]	Array	What files should be deleted from the repo after fetching?	[".rbenv-version", ".ruby-version"]

Usage

rails-app::default

Just include rails-app::default in your node's run_list and override attributes as needed. Generally you will need to override the name, host and repository to download from. An example of this is in the Vagrantfile in this repository.

Packer with Docker

This recipe includes a packer.json file that will build a Docker image and commit it to your local computer. In order to use it you will need to setup your environment first. (Note that this is only tested on Ubuntu 15.04. It should work on other versions of Ubuntu but has some bugs that cause it to not work on OS X, and Windows was not considered.)

0. Perform the steps listed in the Developing section.
1. git - sudo apt-get install git
2. Docker - sudo apt-get install docker.io
3. Download the temporary patched version of packer to work with docker 1.5 located here until the related github issue is fixed.
4. wget https://bintray.com/artifact/download/alkersan/generic/packer_0.8.0_linux_amd64.zip
5. sudo apt-get install unzip
6. unzip packer_0.8.0_linux_amd64.zip
7. sudo mv packer* /usr/local/bin/
8. Install the docker post-processor onto packer. (steps below)
9. Install go - sudo apt-get install golang-go
10. Install mercurial - sudo apt-get install mercurial
11. mkdir ~/go
12. Add the next two lines to .bashrc
13. export GOPATH=~/go
14. export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
15. git clone https://github.com/avishai-ish-shalom/packer-post-processor-docker-dockerfile.git ~/packer-post-processor-docker-dockerfile
16. cd ~/packer-post-processor-docker-dockerfile
17. go get github.com/nitrous-io/goop && go build github.com/nitrous-io/goop
18. goop install - if you get an error on this step, try the build step anyway, it may work.
19. goop go build
20. mv packer-post-processor-docker-dockerfile /usr/local/bin
21. berks vendor cookbooks
22. sudo su
23. service docker start
24. At this point you can run packer build packer.json in the root directory of this project.

Debugging Packer with Docker

If there is a problem happening with the Packer build, it is rather simply to turn on chef debugging output, however poorly documented. In the packer.json file, the provisioner block should be changed to include an override block like below. It will then spit out chef debugging output which is much more useful in the case of an error.

"provisioners": [
  {
    "type": "shell",
    "inline": ["apt-get -y update; apt-get install -y curl libjson-perl"]
  },
  {
    "type": "chef-solo",
    "cookbook_paths": ["cookbooks"],
    "run_list": ["recipe[rails-app::default]"],
    "prevent_sudo": true,
    "json": {        
      "rails-app": {
          "name": "registration-app",
          "ssl": false,
          "repository": "https://github.com/mitre-cyber-academy/registration-app.git",
          "revision": "moveToRails4"
      }},
    "override": {
      "docker": {
        "execute_command": "chef-solo -l debug --no-color -c {{.ConfigPath}} -j {{.JsonPath}}"
      }
    }
  }
]

Developing

1. Install the ChefDK (https://downloads.chef.io/chef-dk/)
2. If you are using rbenv, make sure you add add export PATH="/opt/chefdk/bin:$PATH" to your ~/.bash_profile after your rbenv init line.

Contributing

1. Fork the repository on Github
2. Create a named feature branch (like add_component_x)
3. Write your change
4. Submit a Pull Request using Github

To DO

• Make recipe less fragile to different versions of ruby. Currently if the C compiler prefix (gems/2.1.0/gems) is changed then the recipe will break, that should not happen.

License and Authors

Authors: Robert Clark [email protected]