Chopped

knife-solo kitchen for deploying fun servers.

Intended roles

Factorio host. Would be best with an HTTP API to control the Factorio game instance. Should support generating new saves, listing saves, changing the active save, managing save backups (autosaves), etc. Ubuntu-based service descriptions exist in the wild for Factorio, but are shitty (eg using screen for persistance and daemonization)
- why not just use the existing chef cookbook? Because it's running Factorio, an untrusted C++ binary network service, as root. Unacceptable if we are putting this server on the general internet.
Minecraft host. ????. I don't care how it works, but it should be chef configurable :)
Slackbots host. This will need nodejs_service definition so we can add a bunch of different slackbots or whatnot.

Design

This is my first time chef-ing from scratch, and the ecosystem is baroque to say the least. I'm vaguely following the approach in these articles:

repo setup follows http://www.markjberger.com/an-introduction-to-chef-solo/
vagrant configuration and philosophy follows http://www.talkingquickly.co.uk/2013/10/using-vagrant-to-test-chef-cookbooks/

I want to use runit for service definition and management -- I use it at home and at work, and I appreciate its design.

How to get going

One-time setup:

I suggest creating a new RVM or rbenv context with ruby 2.x for use with this project. I did rbenv install 2.2.3 and then rbenv local 2.2.3 to use ruby 2.2.3 for this.

Perform this one-time setup:

bundle install
bundle exec berks install
vagrant up
bundle exec knife solo prepare vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2222 -i ./.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key prepares your Vagrant machine for knife-solo development by setting up chef on it.
Run vagrant snapshot save chef. If your VM ever becomes inaccessable due to bad chef changes, you can always run vagrant snapshot restore chef to reset it to this known-good state.

Creating a cookbook

Put cookbooks in the site-cookbooks folder. cookbooks folder is reserved for upstream dependencies.

knife cookbook create -o site-cookbooks/ YOUR_NEW_COOKBOOK

GO GO GADGET COOKBOOK.

edit nodes/127.0.0.1.json to configure the run_list for your vagrant box.

Put something like recipe[base] in there for good measure and let it rip:

knife solo cook vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2222 -i ./.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key

On future runs you should be using your own user account to cook and clean the box, since the vagrant user may no longer be allowed to SSH.

Testing chef in Vagrant

Then, you can provision your vagrant box using knife solo to test out this chef repo. I haven't done this yet, but it looks like this in theory:

Useful tips

Put ``127.0.0.1 vagrant-box` to your /etc/hosts file, and a section like this to your SSH config:

Host vagrant-box
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrickHostKeyChecking no
  Port 222

This makes later access via your user ssh USERNAME@vagrant-box or bundle exec knife solo repare USERNAME@vagrantbox instead of needing to manually specify the port.

sjzhu/chopped