Chef metal experimentations: AEM test drive

First published on July 29 2014 and tagged Tech . OpenSource . CQ5 . AEM . Chef . Adobe . Devops .

I’ve been recently playing with chef-metal.

Chef-metal Rocks, it allows you to treat machines/nodes like resources and provision them through vagrant provisioner, EC2, Rackspace, DigitalOcean and Openstack provisioner and even docker provisioner

I just published my latest experimentations on github today I added a chef-metal based cookbook in my connectcon chef repo, this will allow you to have an AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) infrastructure fully configured in matter of minutes using a vagrant provisionner.

Even if you are new to Ruby and Chef, the test drive should take you a few minutes:

  • install vagrant

  • install ruby with rvm

  • install bundler

  • checkout this git chef-repo to your disk

  • edit the dev.json environment file in order to have the download_url and license_url pointing to reachable aem jar and license URLs within your network

  • change directory to the root of the local copy of this git repo

  • launch our ./local_setup.sh

Except for vagrant installation all the above can be boiled down to the following commmand lines:

curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
gem install bundler
git clone https://github.com/francoisledroff/connectcon-chef-repo.git
cd connectcon-chef-repo
./local_setup.sh

A few minutes later you will have a centos vm running on a local IP (set up in our aem-metal default recipe) If this private range IP is in used pick another one, just change the recipe file.

The vm is created by default under .chef/vms . From there, you can ssh in, and then double check aem service is started and eventually stop the firewall to freely access this chef automated cq author instance from your browser at http://192.168.0.20:4502

$ cd .chef/vms
$ vagrant ssh
Last login: Tue Jul 15 16:44:19 2014 from 10.0.2.2
Welcome to your Vagrant-built virtual machine.
[vagrant@author ~]$ sudo service service aem-author status
[vagrant@author ~]$ sudo service iptables stop

What’s next ?

If my agenda allows it, I hope I could demo here as well:

Any feedback will be appreciated.