Chapter 12: Creating Configuration Profiles with Environments

In this lab we are going to use chef's environment primitive to, * Create different configuration profiles. Setup environment specific configurations. * Set cookbook versioning constraints. Define cookbook versions to be used in each environment. This way you could limit your experimentation with your own dev env without affecting rest of the environments. * Provide isolation in combination with search.

Making search more specific with environments

In the previous module, we learnt about search, and even incorporated it to auto discover app servers from load balancer. However with the current configurations, the search results will return list of all app servers, irrespective of the environment. We need to make this search specific to the node's environment.

• Lets update myhaproxy recipe accordingly
• Path: cookbooks/myhaproxy/recipes/default.rb

Update the line which uses search to,

all_web_nodes = search("node", "role:app AND chef_environment:#{node.chef_environment}")

Also update the version in the metadata.

Path: cookbooks/myhaproxy/metadata.rb

version '0.3.0'

Upload the cookbook

knife cookbook upload myhaproxy                                                                                            

Creating a prod environment

• Create a environment file
• Path: sysfoo/environments/prod.rb

name "prod"
description "Production Environment"
cookbook "myhaproxy", "= 0.3.0"
default_attributes({
  "tomcat" => { "deploy"  => {
                 "url" => 'https://11-94848332-gh.circle-artifacts.com/0/tmp/circle-artifacts.6gxaMPh/sysfoo.war'}
              }
})

Uploading and exploring environment

knife environment from file prod.rb   

knife environment show prod

Bringing nodes into the environment

From node4 keep watching the haproxy.cfg

watch -n 1 tail /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg

Lets bring in two nodes into prod env

knife node environment set app1 prod
knife node environment set app2 prod                                                                                         

Keep watching the haproxy config. It should take the two nodes off as the load balancer still belongs to _default env.

Lets bring load balancer into the prod env

knife node environment set lb prod

See as the LB limits itself to serve only to the app servers in its own environment.

You should also see two differnt versions of the applications running in the two environments vz production and _default.