Gusteau

"Anyone can cook."

Gusteau is an easy to use configuration manager for Chef Solo and Vagrant. It aims to:

Provide existing Chef Solo users with a more efficient workflow
Make Chef Solo usable for a small to mid scale multi-node setup
Make Chef Solo more accessible for the new users

Some of the features include:

YAML for readable, flexible infrastructure configuration
Usage of a single SSH connection to stream compressed files and commands
Support for normal Chef CLI flags:
- -W or --why-run (dry run mode)
- -l for setting a log level and -F for setting an output formatter
Bootstrapping target systems with Chef-Omnibus or custom scripts.

Getting started

Gusteau is a Ruby gem:

gem install gusteau

The following command generates an example Chef-repo:

gusteau init project-name

Make sure you read through project-name/README.md first.

A typical .gusteau.yml looks like this:

before:
  - bundle exec berks install --path ./cookbooks

environments:
  development:
    attributes:
      mysql:
        server_root_password: ASahiweqwqe2
      rvm:
        default_ruby: 1.9.3-p362
      users:
       - linguini

    run_list:
      - role[base]
      - recipe[mysql::server]
      - recipe[iptables]

    nodes:
      playground:
        host: 33.33.33.20
        password: omgsecret

Converging a server

The following command will run the whole run_list on the node.

gusteau converge development-playground

Use the --bootstrap or -b flag to bootstrap chef-solo (e.g. during the first run).

Applying individual recipes

You may choose to run a custom run_list instead of the full convergence.

gusteau apply development-playground "role[base],recipe[oh-my-zsh]"

SSH

Gusteau provides a useful shortcut that you may use to ssh into a node. If you haven't got passwordless authentication set up, Gusteau will use user and password values from the node configuration.

gusteau ssh development-playground

Please note that expect utility must be installed for gusteau ssh to work.

If you prefer calling ssh directly, you will find the gusteau ssh_config subcommand useful:

gusteau ssh_config >> ~/.ssh/config

Vagrant

Gusteau can save you from writing some Vagrantfile boilerplate code. It also enables you to move node-specific Vagrant configuration away from the Vagrantfile into node definitions.

nodes:
  www:
    vagrant:
      IP: 192.168.100.20
      cpus: 1
      memory: 512
      box_url: 'https://opscode-vm.s3.amazonaws.com/vagrant/opscode_ubuntu-12.04_provisionerless.box'

The following snippet configures Vagrant for all Gusteau nodes which have vagrant sections defined.

Vagrant.configure('2') do |config|
  Gusteau::Vagrant.detect(config) do |setup|
    setup.prefix = 'loco'
    setup.defaults.box_url = 'http://example.com/vm/opscode_centos-6.4.box'
  end
end

The prefix option lets you prepend your VirtualBox VMs names, e.g. loco-nodename.
The defaults one lets you provide default values for cpus, memory, box_url, box.

Please note that the add-on only works with Vagrant ~> 1.2 and needs gusteau to be installed as a Vagrant plugin:

vagrant plugin install gusteau

Configuration

Before and after hooks

You can tell Gusteau to execute specific commands before and / or after converge or apply take place. They get executed on the host system. Example .gusteau.yml snippet:

before:
  - bundle exec librarian-chef install

after:
  - bundle exec rake spec

Attributes

In addition to specifying attributes for environments you can set node-specifc ones. They will be deep-merged with environment ones:

environments:
  staging:
    attributes:
      hostname: staging
    nodes:
      one:
        attributes: { hostname: staging-one }
      two:
        attributes: { hostname: staging-two }

Run lists

You can also override run_list for specific nodes.

Bootstrap script

By default, Gusteau installs the Omnibus Chef 11.4.4. You can also set the Omnibus Chef version explicitly by specifying it in .gusteau.yml:

chef_version: 10.26.0

If you're targeting a non Omnibus-supported platform you might want to specify the platform value for a node: this invokes a specific script.

Alternatively, you can specify a custom script in .gusteau.yml:

bootstrap: ./scripts/freebsd.sh

Custom cookbooks path

By default, Gusteau uploads and sets Chef Solo up to use cookbooks from ./cookbooks and ./site-cookbooks directories. If it doesn't work for you, you can override these values in .gusteau.yml:

cookbooks_path: [ './my-cookbooks', '../something-else' ]
roles_path: './base-roles'

xTRiM / gusteau