Aether

Summary

We use the Opscode Platform at PharmMD to manage our 50+ servers that we have on Amazon EC2. Sometimes it's nicer to have a web GUI tool that you can point non-techies to, instead of getting them to set up Chef commandline tools.

Aether is that web management interface for our Chef server managed servers. It runs on Rails 3, and currently uses HTTP Basic auth for 'logging in'.

Features

List the servers currently running
Show ssh links to those servers

Planned Features

A better auth system, possibly?
Manage servers (or clusters of servers) with a web interface
Monitor logs of the Chef runs from those servers (using http://pusherapp.com)
Show estimated costs of servers

Assumptions

To group the servers by cluster, I set a node[:cluster_environment] variable on each server I start, for example if I have a staging cluster, I set this to staging using a staging role. If you don't have this variable, then there's no way of knowing how your servers are clustered and they'll just be in one big list.

If you configure your clusters in another way, that's okay. You can make a config/app/production.rb file, and configure it in there. The default is set in config/app.rb, and we can override it in our production.rb file like so:

class App < Configurable
  config.cluster_identification = lambda {|node,name| node[:my_attribute] == name }
end

Getting Started

I currently only use this locally, and to get it going it needs a Chef knife config file in your home directory, specifically in ~/.chef/knife.rb. This works just like Chef itself, so if you have that configured it should just work. So, in short:

Setup a knife.rb in ~/.chef/
Start the Rails server

What does it desperately need?

Some design because it's ugly has hell right now!

rberger/aether