devstation

Uses Chef-provisioning on your Chef workstation to set up another Chef workstation hosted in Microsoft Azure.

Prerequisites

To use this cookbook, do the following on your Chef workstation

Install the Chef Development Kit (Chef-DK)
Configure the workstation with a knife / Berkshelf configuration to interact with a Chef Server
Use the following command to install the latest chef-provisioning-azure gem:

chef gem install chef-provisioning-azure

Configure chef-provisioning-azure with your Azure subscription and associated credentials as described in the chef-provisioning-azure documentation.

Installation

Install the cookbook on your workstation by cloning its repository under a subdirectory managed with your Chef Server's knife configuration:

git clone https://github.com/adamedx/devstation

Usage

This cookbook creates a Chef Windows workstation virtual machine (VM) on Azure bootstrapped against your favorite Chef server. Use chef-client from that workstation to execute this cookbook's default recipe. The cookbook must be run on a Chef workstation that meets the prerequisites:

In a shell, set the current directory to the devstation cloned directory
Use berkshelf to create a cookbooks subdirectory: berks vendor cookbooks
Upload the cookbooks to your Chef server berks upload
Set the shell environment variable DEVSTATION_USER_SECRET to the password you'd like to set for the account localadmin on the remote system.
Set the shell environment variable DEVSTATION_STORAGE_ACCOUNT to use an existing storage account.
Alternatively, each of the shell environment variables above has a counterpart attribute, user_secret and storage_account respectively; the attribute may be specified instead of the environment variable.
Run chef-client in local mode from this cookbook's subdirectory with this cookbook as the runlist: chef-client -z -o devstation

The last command assumes that your knife configuration is in a path at or above the cookbook directory.

What it does

The chef-client run with his cookbook on your Chef workstation will do the following:

Create a VM in Azure named devstation with a public DNS name of devstation.cloudapp.net
Bootstrap it against the Chef server specified in your knife.rb
Run the configuration for the new workstation on the VM.

Refreshing cookbook dependencies

The dependencies for this cookbook may change from time to time. You can refresh them using berkshelf, i.e.

berks vendor cookbooks

Dependencies such as the cookbooks used to provision the remote workstation can then be updated.

Customization

As noted earlier, attributes and environment variables on the system running this cookbook may be used to customize the cookbook's execution -- cookbook attributes always take precedence over environment variables:

Attribute	Environment Variable	Purpose
`user_secret`	`DEVSTATION_USER_SECRET`	Mandatory. The password for the user account `localadmin` that will be created on the VM and used to execute recipes during bootstrap
`storage_account`	`DEVSTATION_STORAGE_ACCOUNT`	Mandatory. You can use existing storage account to which you have access through your Azure subscription, or specify a name unique across all Azure subscriptions for a new storage account
`image_id`	`DEVSTATION_IMAGE_ID`	Optional. The VM image used to create the VM -- defaults to a Windows Server 2012 image: `a699494373c04fc0bc8f2bb1389d6106__Windows-Server-2012-R2-201502.01-en.us-127GB.vhd`
`transport`	`DEVSTATION_TRANSPORT`	Optional. The bootstrap transport, currently either `:winrm` or `:ssh`. Default is `:winrm`
`location`	`DEVSTATION_LOCATION`	Optional. The Azure service location in which to create the VM -- defaults to `West US`
`workstation_name`	`DEVSTATION_WORKSTATION_NAME`	Optional. By default, the VM created by the default recipe is named `devstation` -- specify this setting to override it
`vm_size`	`DEVSTATION_VM_SIZE`	Optional. The VM resource size (e.g. number of cores, memory, etc.). Defaults to `Medium`
`tcp_endpoints`	`DEVSTASTION_TCP_ENDPOINTS`	Optional. Default is the empty string. It can be set with a list of public and private port mappings, e.g. `'3389:3389,22:2222'`
`cloud_service`	None.	Optional. By default, the cloud service is the same as the the workstation name, which itself defaults to `devstation` and results in a public DNS name for the VM of `devstation.cloudapp.net`

License and Authors

License:: Apache License, Version 2.0

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.