What's going to go into the Amoeba kitchen

[bitgangsta]

@hdanak The project is looking great. I love where it's headed. The README confuses me a bit, however. I'm curious what your plan is around the amoeba kitchen. It looks like you plan on making a .amoeba folder. Where does that folder come from? What goes in it?

Our goal is to have two repos / projects. One with the public stuff so it can be open and shared. And one with the private stuff. That private repo could (ideally) be a folder inside our code / project git repo. Or its own repo.

But the point is, we want to make it real easy. Do you plan on making it possible to generate this .amoeba folder / kitchen? Ideally you could do somethign like

$ gem install amoeba-deploy-tools
$ amoeba kitchen create <my-project>
$ ls <my-project>
  .amoeba/nodes.json

or something like this?

I ask because I'm curious what your plan / direction is in. I want to open up what repos we can. And I want to start using the existing chef scripts to provision some new systems. But if this stuff is close, maybe I can help you get it done and we can avoid an annoying migration.

[bitgangsta]

Also, we have certain default "site cookbooks" that we want to use. But it would be nice if users of amoeba-deploy-tools could also use their own / write their own cookbooks.

So while we provide default ones, it'd be nice to be able to override / add cookbooks.

What's your plan around this (if you have one), and where will cookbooks live? Inside the .amoeba kitchen?

[hdanak]

The README is out of date. I originally implemented an ini-based git-like config file inside the .amoeba folder (which would be created by amoeba init <repo-url>, but I changed it so that there is a .amoeba.yml file specifying the kitchen url, kept in the app project repo. So, to answer your question, the .amoeba dir is created by running amoeba init inside the app dir that has a .amoeba.yml file specifying the kitchen repo, or by running amoeba init <repo-url> which creates the .amoeba.yml file as well as the .amoeba dir. In either case the .amoeba dir is a git clone of the kitchen repo. The idea is to use git to fork the public kitchen repo for customization.

[hdanak]

I'll update the README in a bit, in the meantime you can take a look at spec/amoeba_deploy_tools/commands_spec.rb for an up-to-date spec. I'll try to make the README more readable than the spec though.

[hdanak]

@bitgangsta I'm thinking a nice workflow might be to specify the app in a high-level manner in the amoeba.yml file, and set per-environment sensitive info like api keys and other env vars in the chef kitchen repo. The amoeba command would automatically create the node files based on the given app, options, and environment.

I'll try to flesh it out a bit more and put up a more detailed example of what the config file might look like in a few hours.

[hdanak]

After exploring the idea a little further, I don't think it's a good idea to specify the app in the amoeba.yml config file. I think it would be cleaner to just use a git submodule of the chef-library kitchen instead of an .amoeba dir. The .amoeba.yml can be gitignored and contain user config, like vm provider keys (for automatic provisioning), ssh config, command aliases, default node to push, kitchen location etc.