Soloist lets you quickly and easily converge Chef recipes using chef-solo. It does not require a Chef server, but can exploit community cookbooks, github-hosted cookbooks and locally-sourced cookbooks through Librarian.
Soloist was originally built to support the Pivotal Labs Workstation Cookbook, now known as Sprout.
Let's say you want to converge the Pivotal Labs Workstation default recipe and install Sublime Text 2.
-
You'll need to have Soloist installed:
$ gem install soloist
-
You'll need a
Cheffile
in your home directory that points Librarian to all the cookbooks you've included:$ cat /Users/pivotal/Cheffile site "http://community.opscode.com/api/v1" cookbook "pivotal_workstation", :git => "https://github.com/pivotal/pivotal_workstation"
-
You'll need to create a
soloistrc
file in your home directory to tell Chef which recipes to converge:$ cat /Users/pivotal/soloistrc recipes: - pivotal_workstation::default - pivotal_workstation::sublime_text
-
You'll need to run
soloist
for anything to happen:$ soloist
Here's an example of a soloistrc
:
cookbook_paths:
- /opt/beans
recipes:
- beans::chili
- beans::food_fight
- napkins
This tells Soloist to search in both /opt/beans
and ./cookbooks
(relative to the soloistrc
) for cookbooks to run. Then, it attempts to converge the beans::chili
, beans::food_fight
and napkins
recipes.
Soloist lets you override node attributes. Let's say we've got a bash::prompt
recipe for which we want to set node['bash']['prompt']['color']='p!nk'
. No problem!
recipes:
- bash::prompt
node_attributes:
bash:
prompt:
color: p!nk
Soloist allows conditionally switching on environment variables. Let's say we only want to include the embarrassment::parental
recipe when the MEGA_PRODUCTION
environment variable is set to juggalos
. Here's the soloistrc
:
cookbook_paths:
- /fresno
recipes:
- disaster
env_variable_switches:
MEGA_PRODUCTION:
juggalos:
recipes:
- embarrassment::parental
So now, this is the result of our Soloist run:
$ MEGA_PRODUCTION=juggalos soloist
Installing disaster (1.0.0)
Installing embarrassment (1.0.0)
… chef output …
INFO: Run List expands to [disaster, embarrassment::parental, faygo]
… chef output …
If we set MEGA_PRODUCTION=godspeed
, the embarrassment::parental
recipe is not converged.
Soloist can also run one-off recipes:
$ soloist run_recipe lice::box
Installing lice (1.0.0)
… chef output …
INFO: Run List expands to [lice::box]
… chef output …
This just runs the lice::box
recipe from your current set of cookbooks. It still uses all the node_attributes
and env_variable_switches
logic.
Soloist runs chef-solo
at log level info
by default, which is helpful when you need to see what your Chef run is doing. If you need more information, you can set the LOG_LEVEL
environment variable:
$ LOG_LEVEL=debug soloist
See LICENSE for details.