Now that we have a server running our database, we want to make it also able to run our rails app. As I said in the previous post, I could use the full application cookbook, but I’d have to create my own cookbook and recipe to use that properly. For now, I’ll just rely on rackbox (and its dependency appbox).

Managing with appbox

The appbox cookbook does pretty much the stuff that we configured earlier (setting up users etc). Since it’s a dependency of rackbox, we are pretty much forced to use it (rackbox does call appbox default recipe).

Having added appbox to our Berksfile, I had to modify the roles/base.rb :

• Let app box know that my admin user name is wam.
• Generate a ssh key for to login as the deploy user.
• Make sure the app box recipe is run before I run my sudo and users::sysadmins recipe.

We’ll start by creating the deploy key :

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$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "wam@scube" -f ~/.ssh/scube_deploy_rsa

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name "base"
description "Base role applied to all nodes."
run_list(
  "recipe[apt]",
  "recipe[build-essential]",
  "recipe[git]",
  "appbox",
  "recipe[users::sysadmins]", # Necessary to run after appbox to add our stuff
  "recipe[sudo]" # Same
)
override_attributes(
  "appbox"  => {
    "deploy_keys" => [
      "ssh-rsa [...]" # content of ~/.ssh/scube_deploy_rsa.pub
    ],
    "admin_user" => "wam",
  }
)

Adding a rack server

I’ve chosen to use passenger + nginx, which is a popular choice among the rails community. I was tempted for a moment by puma on jruby, but I want my app online faster and will bother changing this kind of thing later (chef makes it easy to test new nodes with new recipes..)

Let’s create a roles/app_server.rb :

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name "app_server"
description "Serving http requests for the app. Main app server"
run_list(
  "rackbox"
)
override_attributes(
  "rackbox" => {
    "ruby" => {
      "versions"=> ["1.9.3-p385"],
      "global"=> "1.9.3-p385"
    },
    "apps"=> {
      "passenger"=> [
        {"appname"=> "scube", "hostname"=> "my.hostname.com"}
      ]
    }
  }
)

Now to make it work with vagrant, two changes are necessary in our Vagrantfile :

• We need to make sure that the chef version we are using is 11 or more. By default my vagrant was using chef 10, and the rackbox (more specifically the runit it uses) was throwing an error (NameError: Cannot find a resource for load_new_resource_state on ubuntu version 12.04).
• We add a port mapping to access the http port of our server on localhost:8888

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# Stuff here
config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 80, host: 8888
# Put this line just before your config.vm.provision :chef_solo line
config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => "gem install chef --version 11.4.2 --no-rdoc --no-ri --conservative"

The :shell provision makes sure that vagrant updates the chef gem before actually running our chef-solo provision. Now it’s on to vagrant provision, stuff should appear in green and http://localhost:8888 should show a 404 error. Yes of course, we haven’t deployed our app yet. That’ll be next.