I don't want to use berks in production because I don't like the idea of nodes going out to the web to pull cookbooks (I only want them to pull them from the Chef server in the normal way). But I like using Berks for local development because it resolves the dependencies for kitchen for me.
I was thinking about just adding berksfile and berksfile.lock to gitignore, but I figured I'd ask if it is possible to accomplish this with berks without removing it from production.
"nodes" will never go to the internet looking for cookbooks, they'll always be sourced from the chef server, so.... The question back is: how do you propose to deliver cookbooks to the chef server used to manage your production nodes?
What most people appear to do is commit the Berkshelf lock file and just run a "berks apply" against the target chef server. That will most likely fit your needs.
Personally, I like better separation between development and my production/non-production systems. I create a release tarball containing all the cookbooks that I've tested in development, using the "vendor" command in Berkshelf, and store this binary in a revision control system like Nexus. I suspect many would consider this over-kill, but it enables me to deliver an off-line (no internet connection required) and traceable delivery of my configuration.
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I have inherited a Read The Docs in-house installation (to see our internal git server), in which it was a known issue that the build volume would eventually run full. Now it has again and we would like to find the proper solution. We currently run in Openshift and to my understanding the build job runs "next to" the web server and communicate through shared volumes, including a build volume.
It appears that the problem is that old builds (notably Pull Requests) are not deleted but stay for ever on the build volume. I am not a Django programmer so I am unfamiliar with these kind of applications making the spelunking challenging.
Is this a simple setting about cleaning that my ex-colleague have missed, or where should I look in the sources? The last thing he did before leaving was upgrading to 6.0.
We are looking for a way to use GitHub on an internal system that we are developing at work. We have developed it in PHP and MySQL, with a fair bit of jQuery/Ajax, on a Windows Server VM running IIS. Other staff can access the frontend over the network using the IP address.
There are currently three people working on it and at the moment we directly edit the file on the VM as we need it to still communicate with the database to check our changes have worked. There is no option to install anything like WAMP on our individual machines and there are the usual group policy restrictions so the only access we have to a database is via the VM. We have been working with copies of files/folders and the database but there is always the risk that then merging these would be a massive task.
I do use GitHub (mainly desktop but I can just about get by with using the command line as long as I have a list of the command in front of me) at home to sync between my PC and Laptop, via GitHub.com and believe that the issues we get with several people needing to update the same file would be eradicated by using it here at work.
However, there are some queries we need to ensure we have straight in our heads before putting forward a request.
Is what we are asking for viable? Can several branches on the same server be worked on at the same time or would this only work on an individual machine.
Given that our network is fairly restricted, is there any way that we can work on the files on our machine and connect to a VM hosted database? I believe that an IDE will allow us to run php files on a standard machine (although a request for Eclipse is now around 6 weeks old and there is still no confirmation that we will get it any time soon) but will this also allow .
The stuff we do is not overly sensitive but the company would certainly not want what we do out there in a public repository (and also would not be likely to pay for a premium GitHub account) so we would need to branch/pull/merge directly from our machines to the VM.
Does anyone have any advice/suggestions/solutions to this? Although GitHub would be a preferred option as I already use it, we are open to any suggestion that will allow three people, on different machines, simultaneously work on a central system while ensuring that we do not overwrite or affect each others stuff.
Setting up a git repo on Windows is not trivial and may require a fair bit of work. You can try using SVN it is fairly straight forward to install on windows and has a better learning curve than Git. I am not saying SVN is better/worse as compared to Git, it's much better suited to your needs. We have a similar setup and we use Tortoise SVN https://subversion.apache.org/ as a client. SVN also has branches and stuff.
SVN for server side repository https://subversion.apache.org/
If you would still prefer Git on windows, check this out - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/step-guide-setup-secure-git-remote-repository-windows-nivedan-bamal
1) It is possible to work on many branches and then merge them into a single branch. That's the preferred Git development way. You can do the same on SVN.
I have read about the advantages of using a BitNami stack for LAMP development, now I am wondering if there are any drawbacks to using BitNami vs manually installing PHP, MySQL, and Apache separately. I use Mac OS but I would be interested on how it applies to both Mac and Windows. Any thoughts?
I am one of the developers of BitNami. Whether to use a native stack or a BitNami stack depends on what you are trying to do. Installing the individual items separately should be exactly the same as running our installer, and the whole purpose why we put the installers together is so you would not have to :) In the case of Mac, one of the advantages of BitNami is that you can have more up-to-date components and multiple installations. A disadvantage / difference is that the applications and path will be different than the typical ones so if you are using third-party tutorials or documentation, it may not work right away
There are 3 common drawbacks to Bitnami vs. a native LEMP/LAMP stack:
File paths. Because Bitnami is a container approach to web stacks, it installs everything in Ubuntu (or whatever Linux distro) under the /opt/bitnami directory. So, many developers who are used to customizing their stack using nano or vim editors (via the Bash shell) quickly discover that you first have to figure out where all the different configuration files of your stack modules reside, etc. Even after you figure those out, most of the online tutorials and documentations you might find will not apply to your stack.
Lockdown. This could be seen as either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on your perspective (and situation). The entire point of using a containerized approach is to have more control of the stack environment, which can improve compatibility, predictability, security, and otherwise. However as #team-life mentioned, this can quickly become frustrating when you are trying to use "standard" Bash shell commands or even the MySQL CLI, e.g. when trying to analyze or replicate your stack, etc. To put it simply, logging into shell on a server where Bitnami is installed is not in fact logging into the actual shell :)
Upgrades. At the end of the day, Bitnami (and other containers, like Docker) are adding another "layer" to your stack, and thus, more bloat. For some users this "bloat" is justifiable, and preferable (for example, very large companies who require across-the-board uniformity). But what many developers discover with Bitnami and containers is upgrading your stack can be rather janky. For all the alleged advantages in terms of environment "stability", it turns out that upgrading your stack can actually introduce quite a bit of instability and unpredictability, often to the extent of canceling out the benefits. As #domi mentioned, all upgrades run through Bitnami (and not Ubuntu mirrors, etc) meaning you are bound to their versions and release schedules; you are also often required to completely re-install the stack again...
Ultimately, containers are a recent trend that have become very popular among so-called "enterprise" and "corporate" in-house teams, but it is one of those things that might not be the best features for smaller agencies or independent developers to embrace.
That is why native LEMP stacks like SlickStack (my project) are gaining momentum.
This Reddit thread has a few other AWS-specific comments as well.
BitNami uses paths that will be very different from the industry standard ones so if you are trying to login to a server to do some task, it will take you a lot of time to understand their custom-made-folder-structure. And that's a big drawback. When you login to a unix server, you know where the files and paths are, maybe you have one or two options, that are standard. BitNami uses a completely different one. Chaos ensues.
I'm a happy bitnami stack user. It's a great stack. I can describe many advantages.
The draw back of using bitnami stack is the update cycle. For example on Debian/Ubuntu based system, you can not use the standard apt-get update/upgrade.
That means some security updates might not get to your system as fast as your standard cron (automated periodic) update mechanism.
To upgrade the system you will need to create backup, install a new stack, then import the backup to the new stack. Which might not be an ideal procedure.
Some people categorize that as non-production-environment.
Bitnami - ease of use, validated components - known working good configuration.
Disadvantage - Patches and updates. you cannot update packages for security like you can for native install. Any bulletins must be addressed by the bitnami team, who may/will roll out an update to address issues. The bitnami updates are full stack upgrades, meaning you can't just upgrade a single component (php for example) - you need to upgrade the whole bitnami stack, and the often recommended method is to backup your application database, install a parallel bitnami stack that has the latest updates, then restore or migrate to the new installation.
Some will tell you that you can shoehorn patches into bitnami stacks, but it's not at all recommended, will lead you off the stack and most likely cause you down stream issues.
Bitnami evidently is unable to use certain commands from their mysql command line. I'm finding this very frustrating. Here is some stuff I found out.
It puts you into its own bash shell bash-4.2#
mysql>SHOW MASTER STATUS returns -> (nothing) doesn't seem to work
rcmysql start or stop doesn't work from mysql> you have to shell out of where your at and run the ctlscript.sh which is a pain.
Just to get to command line you have to run ./use_lampstack
I'm guessing that they are giving us a very paired down mysql group of commands because there will be less for them to support and less for people to jack up.
So this came up for me because I was trying setup replication. I was following directions from someone who had a "regular" install. It was difficult to follow because most of the commands he was suggesting didn't work from the bitnami mysql> command line. So while I really like the uniformity of Bitnami and the modular nature of it I have run into a snag trying to setup replication.
I setup mercurial on my server, but I am unclear how things should be. I am looking for more examples of different setups, but perhaps I am using the wrong keywords. Right now, it is only going to be a handful of developers, and I am unsure if I should just make the repo as the DocumentRoot. I really don't know what questions to ask since this is new to me, but I would appreciate it if anyone could provide some knowledge and guidance. Some questions that I do have right now is, how I should setup my servers and repositories? Should I setup a separate VirtualHost for a test clone before making it live? Anything would be helpful! Thanks in advance!
There's probably not a reason to do this. I would keep them separate but set up an automated process (either a custom script or continuous integration (CI)) to deploy from Mercurial to the site by running a single command. Optionally, you can make every commit trigger a deployment.
EDIT: With continuous integration, it is the CI's server's responsibility for deploying. If you use SSH, the CI would pull from hg, export, then upload through SSH. That should address your issues. For a comparison of CI servers that support Mercurial, see this question.
I don't have The answer to give you, since many variables and need affect the workflow, but here is some links to get you started :
http://www.zdnetasia.com/a-development-workflow-for-mercurial-62204755.htm
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/Workflows
http://www.webdevelopment.nicholastuck.com/tools/one-project-one-repository-mercurial-used-right/
I will also recommend you to read this excellent Mercurial introduction : http://hginit.com/
You can also find various questions on SO about workflows with Mercurial, have a look on the sidebars to the right for example.
When you will have some more specific question, don't hesitate to ask again !
I would make your DocumentRoot directory a first-level subdirectory of your repository, and here's some reasons why:
If you're using something like Apache to manage your server, you could put other meta-information - like sites-available and sites-enabled configuration files - in a sibling directory, since they're not really a part of the website documents.
Similarly, you can keep a "docs" directory right next to the code.
If your repository root is your DocumentRoot, all other things being equal, you are also serving up your .hg directory, where your whole repository history is, and your .hgignore file, that kind of thing. You can fix this with a .htaccess file, of course, but it's simpler just to have the child folder.
Essentially, codebases tend not to be exactly one-to-one matches with deployed sites, so I tend to favor having the document root be a subdirectory.
Deployment is a whole 'nother can of worms. It really depends on your needs as to what you do, but here's what I do:
I run a VirtualBox instance on my computer that looks as close as possible to what my deployed server looks like, at least as close as I can get the configuration files to be. I would argue that this approach is less error-prone than an additional VirtualHost entry. Depending on the project, I can get this down to being identical minus perhaps some DNS entries, so I can set everything up to either point to testing.myproject or production.myproject, and this I always automate (I use chef, but that is overkill for a smaller project) so that it's testable code and not prone to finger-fumbling. There's nothing worse than running smoke tests that wipe your database - and have the config accidentally pointing to your prod db. Running a virtual machine lets you painlessly test upgrades to the environment or OS of your server, and you can nuke and restore to a snapshot if you want to go to an earlier state of the machine's configuration.
If you really want to prevent SSH developer access to your prod machines - and IMO, that's a bad idea, because if you have problems on your production server, you've prevented your developers from diagnosing or fixing it - then I think your best bet is to use something like hudson, which is a continuous integration framework. You only give ssh access to the Hudson user to run your deploy script, but anyone (with the right privileges set in Hudson) can run that job. In fact, this is handy to have in an environment where you have e.g. some product management members you want to have the ability to update the production server without being able to log in. The "poor man's" version of this is using sudo to allow your devs to run a command as another user who does have ssh access - and only allowing them to run the publish script.
I would still recommend giving your devs access to your machine, though you don't have to hand over the keys to the kingdom. Just create a "developers" group, assign your devs to it, and give it enough permissions to play with the necessary directories of the server, and you should be good to go.
For the website(s) I am a developer for we have a number of different technologies which make up our stack, each with a different set of configurations etc.
This is a Rails stack, so we're running things including:
Nginx w/ Passenger
Varnish
Redis
Memcached
MySQL
MongoDB
As we're continually tweaking our configs and changing them to support our continually changing system, and if we were to 'lose' the configurations (e.g. due to a server crash or otherwise) it would be a huge pain to rebuild from memory.
Given that version control would be extremely useful I can quite easily add these files into a Git repo or similar and store them in the cloud somewhere, but what about application-specific configuration (for example, URL Rewrite config for a website on a shared server)? Should these be in this same repo as well?
Put website specific stuff in the Git repo of that website, and system-wide stuff in a "systems" git repo.
If you are not currently using Source Control (of any kind) in your development environment, stop whatever you are doing and sort that out right now. That is the most important aspect of your setup.
At a very minimum you should keep EVERYTHING that is a text file and relates to your app (yes all config files, URL rewrites).
Others suggest you can put binary files also, but at the very minimum all source code, all config etc should be in source control.
By the end of the day :)