So you’ve decided to use chef-provisioning and you want to use chef-provisioning-fog to talk to your OpenStack cloud. Awesome, but there are a few things you need to do before it works.

First, you need to probably read up on chef-provisioning. I’ll be honest, it’s confusing, complex but crazy powerful if you get the foundation. My tl;dr of using chef-provisioning is: you want a machine resource to build a cluster/multiple machines to do something. For instance building out a Dev/QA environment from scratch for an application you support. Or building out a “POD” for another instance of your application; chef-provisioning’ll take care of the machines and orchestration for you.

Like all chef recipes, it starts at the top. So if you need to build out a specific machine first, then have later machines check in with it. A provisioning recipe will complete each one in order, and not continue until it’s done. With this type of orchestration you can create interdependencies using your chef server with chef search to have machines “know” about each other during this provisioning cycle. Pretty slick. This example won’t show this; but this’ll at least get you started on that path.

Ok, so lets say you want 4 machines, 3 dev-webservers, and 1 qa-webserver, with different base images, and user accounts. For whatever reason you’re dev is Ubuntu, and your QA is CentOS. You’ll need to write something like the following:

require 'chef/provisioning' with_machine_options ({ :bootstrap_options => { :flavor_ref => 3 , :image_ref => 'my-fake-ubuntu-image-0c1f2c38432b' , :nics => [{ :net_id => 'my-tenantnetwork-id-89afddb9db6c' }], :key_name => 'mykeyname' , :floating_ip_pool => 'ext-net' }, :ssh_username => 'ubuntu' }) machine_batch 'dev' do 1 . upto ( 3 ) do | n | instance = " #{ name } -webserver- #{ n } " machine instance do recipe 'apache::default' tag " #{ name } -webserver- #{ n } " converge true end end end machine 'qa-webserver' do tag 'qabox' machine_options ({ bootstrap_options: { :flavor_ref => 3 , :nics => [{ :net_id => 'my-tenantnetwork-id-89afddb9db6c' }], :key_name => 'jdizzle' , :image_ref => 'my-centos-image-2b0b6bb7b0c12b0b6bb7b0c1' , :floating_ip_pool => 'some-other-network' }, :ssh_username => 'centos' }) role 'webserver' converge true end

As you can see, you want the same “default” options for Ubuntu, but you can override the machine_options in the machine resource. You can also add a specific role to the boxes, in this case they are both webserver .

Here’s an opportunity to build a destroy.rb so you can blow away your machine(s). Something simple like this:

require 'chef/provisioning' machine_batch do machines search ( :node , '*:*' ). map { | n | n . name } action :destroy end

After doing this, you’ll need to install the chef-provisioning-fog gem.

~$ gem install chef-provisioning-fog

If you have a knife.rb already, you can break it open and this is where you can declare how to connect to your OpenStack cloud. You’ll need to fill in the following with your own strings:

driver 'fog:OpenStack' driver_options :compute_options => { :openstack_auth_url => 'http://YOUROPENSTACK-CLOUD:5000/v2.0/tokens' , :openstack_username => 'YOURUSERNAME' , :openstack_api_key => 'YOURPASSWORD' , :openstack_tenant => 'YOURTENANTIDNAME' }

Something that bit me, was the name of the :key_name . It seems that the ssh key needs to match what you call it in the machine_options above. So I did this:

~$ cp ~/.ssh/id_rsa ~/.ssh/jdizzle

I know it’s not great, but hell it worked and I’m not going to complain.

After this, you can go to where you wrote your provisioning script and run these commands,

~$ export CHEF_DRIVER=fog:OpenStack # this is only needed if you haven't added the driver to your knife.rb ~$ chef-client -z my_provisioning_script.rb

You should see chef-zero kick off and soon you’ll see your machines in your OpenStack cloud. When you want to blow everything away, all you need to do is:

~$ chef-client -z destroy.rb

This should be enough to get you off the ground. Happy Provisioning!