Intercity Chef Recipes

This Chef repository aims at being the easiest way set up and configure your own Rails server to host one or more Ruby on Rails applications using best practices from our community.

The configuration is heavily inspired by blog posts and chef recipes from 37signals and the Opscode Community Cookbooks.

Features

Takes care of automatic installation and configuration of the following software on a single server or multiple servers:

nginx webserver
Passenger or Unicorn for running Ruby on Rails
Multiple apps on one server
Database creation and password generation
Easy SSL configuration
Deployment with Capistrano
Configure ENV variables
Easy backup scheduling

Supported OSes

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Databases

MySQL
PostgreSQL

Getting started

The following paragraphs will guide you to set up your own server to host Ruby on Rails applications.

Assumptions

An "ubuntu" user exists on the remote machine.

1. Set up this repository

Clone the repository onto your own workstation. For example in your ~/Code directory:

$ cd ~/Code
$ git clone git://github.com/devangvdesai/chef-repo.git chef_repo

Run bundle:

$ bundle install

Run Librarian install:

$ librarian-chef install

2. Install your server

Use the following command to install Chef on your server and prepare it to be installed by these cookbooks:

bundle exec knife solo prepare <your user>@<your host/ip>

For passing an identity file use the following - Kinfe solo commands: Example

bundle exec knife solo prepare <your user>@<your host/ip> -i /path/to/pem_file

This will create a file

nodes/<your host/ip>.json

Now copy the the contents from the nodes/sample_host.json from this repository into this new file. Replace the sample values between < > with the values for your server and applications.

When this is done. Run the following command to start the full installation of your server:

bundle exec knife solo cook <your user>@<your host/ip> -i /path/to/pem_file

3. Deploy your application

You can deploy your applications with Capistrano.

Add the Capistrano gem to your Gemfile:

# your other gems..

gem 'capistrano', '~> 3.2.1'
gem 'capistrano-rails', '~> 1.1'

And run bundle to install it:

bundle

Now generate configuration files for Capistrano:

bundle exec cap install

This command will generate the following files in your application:

Capfile
config/deploy.rb
config/deploy/production.rb
config/deploy/staging.rb

Edit the file Capfile and change it's contents to:

# Load DSL and Setup Up Stages
require 'capistrano/setup'

# Includes default deployment tasks
require 'capistrano/deploy'

require 'capistrano/rails'

# Loads custom tasks from `lib/capistrano/tasks' if you have any defined.
Dir.glob('lib/capistrano/tasks/*.cap').each { |r| import r }

Then edit config/deploy.rb and change it to the sample below. Replace >> your git repo_url << with the SSH clone URL of your repository:

# config valid only for Capistrano 3.2.1
lock '3.2.1'

set :application, '>> your_application_name <<'
set :repo_url, '>> your git repo_url <<'

# Default branch is :master
# Uncomment the following line to have Capistrano ask which branch to deploy.
# ask :branch, proc { `git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`.chomp }

# Replace the sample value with the name of your application here:
set :deploy_to, '/u/apps/>> your_application_name <<_production'

# Use agent forwarding for SSH so you can deploy with the SSH key on your workstation.
set :ssh_options, {
  forward_agent: true
}

# Default value for :pty is false
set :pty, true

set :linked_files, %w{config/database.yml .rbenv-vars .ruby-version}
set :linked_dirs, %w{log tmp/pids tmp/cache tmp/sockets vendor/bundle public/system}

set :default_env, { path: "/opt/rbenv/shims:$PATH" }

set :keep_releases, 5

namespace :deploy do

  desc 'Restart application'
  task :restart do
    on roles(:app), in: :sequence, wait: 5 do
      execute :touch, release_path.join('tmp/restart.txt')
    end
  end

  after :publishing, :restart

end

Replace the contents of config/deploy/production.rb with

server '>> your server address <<', user: 'deploy', roles: %w{web app db}

Replace >> your server address << with the domain name or ip address of your server.

To verify that everything is set up correctly run:

bundle exec cap production deploy:check

Finally to deploy, run:

bundle exec cap production deploy

This will deploy your app and run your database migrations.

Congratulations! You've now deployed your application. Browse to your application in your webbrowser and everything should work!

Try these cookbooks with Vagrant

You can use Vagrant to experience how easy it is to install your servers with this repository.

First, install Vagrant from http://vagrantup.com. Then install the following two Vagrant plugins:

Make sure you have Vagrant version 1.6.5 or higher installed.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-librarian-chef
vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus

Finally, start a Vagrant machine with a sample server configuration:

vagrant up mysql

This will boot a local Ubuntu virtual machine and install it so you can deploy Ruby on Rails applications that use MySQL as the database.

You can check out the sample configuration in file Vagrantfile

When you run into problems:

These steps should let you set up or test your own Rails infrastructure in 5 - 10 minutes. If something doesn't work or you need more instructions:

Please! Open an issue or email hello@intercityup.com.

Testing with test-kitchen

CI testing

Test-kitchen is a tool where you can automatically provision a server with these cookbooks and run the tests for them. The configuration in .kitchen.yml works with DigitalOcean.

First you need to obtain a DigitalOcean access token here: https://cloud.digitalocean.com/settings/applications. Then you need to find IDs of the SSH keys you added to your account: https://cloud.digitalocean.com/ssh_keys. You can obtain these IDs with the following command:

$ curl -X GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/account/keys -H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_DIGITALOCEAN_ACCESS TOKEN>"

When you've obtained both your access token and your key IDs you can run the tests like this:

$ export DIGITALOCEAN_ACCESS_TOKEN=<YOUR DIGITALOCEAN ACCESS TOKEN>
$ export DIGITALOCEAN_SSH_KEY_IDS=<YOUR DIGITALOCEAN SSH KEY ID>
$ bin/kitchen test

This command boots up a Droplet in your DigitalOcean account, provisions it with Chef, runs the tests and destroys the Droplet.

Testing while developing

If you want to keep the Droplet running and do testing while making changes you can use the kitchen verify command instead of the kitchen test command to verify your changes:

$ bin/kitchen verify

Resources and original authors

Most of the cookbooks that are used in this repository are installed from the Opscode Community Cookbooks.
The rails and bluepill configuration is based off the cookbooks by jsierles at https://github.com/jsierles/chef_cookbooks