September 2014 Archives

I just noticed it's been 1 month and 5 days, depending on how you slice it, since my initial chef-themed entry. That's several business days, without a complete working result that can build my software. Granted, a lot of learning and bootstrap stuff. But, I don't have a server with clients I can instantly deploy and have it build all my existing jobs in a staging environment.

What I have, is a codebase that improves on shared commons code, that can deploy my jenkins master with options depending on what environment it is, and can deploy locally or onto my staging services. That's already a lot better than what I had before, even if it's not complete yet. For example, I know what pinned versions of what things work in combination currently, and what options matter to me.

I'm seeing erb template hell in front of my eye. It's really cool to be able to flip a value in a ruby template file, but how do you pre-flight just the one file? And, how do you use a library function in the template helpers?

It's pissing me off.

Good news, there's an interactive interpreter (sometimes called REPL) for chef, named shef. The bad news? Configuring your jenkins instance without trashing the current one is still thorny.