Can I use chef as a PaaS deployment orchestrator to deploy multiple drupal sites?

Question

"I do apologize prior to asking this dumb question "

So, my idea is to have :

• A chef server
• N nodes

On each node; i'll define a basic role; like "NodeRole" which will have apache,php,mysql

Then, i'd like to be able to deploy 'à la demande' multiple virtualhosts each containing a full drupal install.

So this new role will have some attributes like :

"username"
"password"
"URL"

When 'deploying' this; it will :

- Add an entry to apache virtual host configuration
- Create a user account with provided password
- Create a database user with provided password
- Install drupal with the provided credentials

How can I do this 'dynamically' without having to create a txt file each time I want to deploy a new site.

Is it possible to interact with the chef server api and say something like "deploy www.example.com john mypassword" ?

Thanks !

Answer 1

Chef is a pull model it's up to the clients to request their configuration. If you want to push you'll have to inject something else in to allow you to do that. A command dispatcher which can invoke the client to contact the server when you want.

If you want to do the same thing over and over it feels like creating a LWRP http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Lightweight+Resources+and+Providers+(LWRP) might be your best bet. You could then pass into it the variables you have and that way the code doesn't need reproduced X times.

If you didn't want to have to create new recipes for each install one other option would be to use the JSON mash capabilites in the attributes object and loop through a collection of objects creating the installs. This way it's data driven but personally I would look to use different recipes per install as it would probably be more transparent to people viewing the runlist.

An example of using the attributes mash is shown below. You could acheive this with a databag as well. In this case you could then update the JSON representation in a file and upload with knife or make the changes in the UI. Again I would recommend a recipe per site for transparency but that would lead to code/updating runlists etc

Your attribute json object would look a bit like this or similar

"drupal_Sites" : {
    "site1": { "username": "dave", "password" :"password123", "URL":"www.madeup.com" },
    "site2": { "username": "dave2", "password" :"password12", "URL":"www.madeup2.com" }
}

Then in your recipe it would be something like this

node["drupal_sites"].each do | site | 

Install = yourdrupalcookbook_InstallResource "#{site['URL']}" do
    username site['username']
    password site['password']
    deploy site['URL']
    action :nothing 
    provider "yourdrupalcookbook_InstallProvider"
end

Install.run_action(:create)

end