Securely deploying sensitive data with Chef can be achieved through the use of encrypted databags, which can be managed easily with a properly configured knife.rb file. If you’re using Chef as your configuration management solution, you are probably familiar with it’s powerful command line utility, knife, which allows one to interact with the chef server… Continue reading Using Knife and Knife.rb for Managing Databags
Category: DevOps
Integration Testing with KitchenCI First Steps
When you want to test the integration of your snowflake data into your environments you should consider KitchenCI. You should understand Test Driven Development with RSpec and Chef to such a degree that you have exhausted it as a resource. In that post we created a set of acceptance criteria and tests that support a… Continue reading Integration Testing with KitchenCI First Steps
Building Base Boxes with Packer
Packer is a powerful tool that enables the creation of identical multi-platform virtual machine images from a definition file. In this article we will discuss how to create base virtual machines for testing and deployment with nmdpacker. One of the bigger challenges we face when working with team based infrastructure management is how to provide… Continue reading Building Base Boxes with Packer
Test Driven Development with RSpec and Chef
Test driven development (TDD) ensures that you’ve properly defined your code’s goals, that your code has achieved these goals, and that future changes to the code will not break existing functionality. Now that we have addressed the fundamental concepts of using Chef data and cookbooks, it’s useful to step through a specific example using the… Continue reading Test Driven Development with RSpec and Chef
Setting Up to Develop with Chef Data and Cookbooks
Think of the chef repo as your snowflake, or the data that makes your organization unique. One of the hardest challenges, at this stage, is keeping the unique pieces of your data contained in such a way that it supports the principles we touched on at the beginning of this series. When you work with… Continue reading Setting Up to Develop with Chef Data and Cookbooks
Sharing a Local Vagrant VM With Other Devices
In Drupal-lamp we usually have a private virtual machine when in development. Under this scenario you can only access the site from the host machine where you spun up. However, there are situations where you would want the vm to be available to other devices on your network. (e.g., testing a site on a mobile… Continue reading Sharing a Local Vagrant VM With Other Devices
Drupal Settings Per Environment
We have a need at NEWMEDIA for certain Drupal settings and configurations to be present in production, in staging, and while on a development machine. I will be outlining the problem and a solution we use here at NEWMEDIA. Problem We develop and release sites at NEWMEDIA in phased releases. During each iteration new functionality… Continue reading Drupal Settings Per Environment
Getting Started with Chef Cookbooks
A challenge faced by users of Open Source lies in understanding how to properly evaluate and use a given piece of code. Let’s walk through evaluating and getting set up to work with an opscode chef cookbook in the context of our ideal system. These examples will focus on our nmdbase cookbook from a development… Continue reading Getting Started with Chef Cookbooks
Drupal DevOps Meetup Moved
On Thursday, September 19 NEWMEDIA will be hosting a meetup at our offices in Downtown Denver. This meetup will be focused on DevOps. We will begin by focusing on the individual and address specific solutions that can be used by a single person doing Drupal development. We will then branch out and discuss specific workflows,… Continue reading Drupal DevOps Meetup Moved