Hi, folks:
I’ve been inactive on the main chef mailing list for some time, and due to a recent layoff, find myself with some time to come back. Hi indeed!
I’ve done some work lately with setting up chef-solo based nodes for complete source control of the working chef setups. The structure is designed to store all node configurations in git, to support complete control of all cookbooks in use through using a local Berkshelf to lock down cookbook versions and souce control local cookbooks, and to support node configurations and templates for use by multiple nodes. I’ve published it at:
Part of the point is to be able to use this on a local development server, with complete control of even local testing cookbooks, without publishing them to a central chef server that may distort chef runs on other servers. It is much cheaper to set this up on a half a dozen different servers than to set up half a dozen different chef servers to go with different versions of the same testable cookbook, or altered roles for localized testing. The structure is also compatible with testing on a local server, then publishing to a producton chef server.
I’d really welcome any observations, requests for enhancement, or bug fixes people may suggest. I’ve found it very useful for testing and QA environments rather than building up chef servers in dev environments.