Provision and Bootstrap AWS instances with Chef

This is continuation of the previous post called Provision with Chef – baby steps. Today we going to talk about the process of bootstrapping instances with Chef used by FastCompany

At this point I assume that you already got chef repo setup and wondering how you could use it to configure your fresh instances.  …

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Mastering chef-solo: deploy to target machines and automatic run on boot

This post will cover some basics behind chef-solo and the way I use it to configure machines.

With recent changes to attributes introduced in Chef 11 chef-solo became even more useful for small infrastructures and testing cookbooks with Vagrant.

What

As you probably already know chef can function in two modes:

  • chef client and server ( one server many clients ) –  …

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Secure data bag items with chef solo

How to generate encrypted data bag item with knife and chef-solo

This post is mostly a memo to myself, because I often forget how to how to create encrypted data bag items..

Here is the deal. We know how to generate regular data bag items with knife: knife data bag create DATA_BAG_NAME DATA_BAG_ITEM ( for those who didn’t know ).  …

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Provision with Chef – baby steps (installation and initial configuration)

In the previous post I wrote about our pre-chef approach for instance bootstrapping.

Today I will explain the process of our migration to Chef. I’m sure that could be useful for someone down the road, who’s trying to travel on similar route.  …

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Nullmailer and Fakemail – two little tools for every developer

From time to time I need to work with outgoing mails: change templates, make sure they display correct data etc. You could go with some full blown MTA like postfix and it’s actually pretty easy to install and configure for outgoing mail sending. I personally tend to not install MTA on my dev box,  …

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Problem with Drupal 6 CURL and Simpletest

When I had to switch from my usual Linux dev box to Mac 10.7 recently (because of Sandy hurricane), I noticed a problem with CURL when I was running my tests through command line.

Basically CURL was just returning output to STDOUT instead of passing it to a variable as it should because of RETURNTRANSFER option in the simpletest class.  …

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