Welcome!

You have found the chef-server self-contained development environment. It aims to get you up and hacking on chef-server components in a safe, pain-free manner.

In short it will create a simple Vagrant VM, while still allowing you to do your development from the comfort of your own host. Changes to make are loaded immediately into the running service (for erlang projects with sync support) or otherwise made available on the guest VM.

Quick Start

This assumes familiarity with the components of chef-server and that you want to run oc_erchef off of your local machine.

Requirements:

• VirtualBox 4.3+
• Vagrant 1.7+
• At least one recent Chef Server 12.0.9+ debian package download, which you can grab from https://packagecloud.io/chef/current. Note that you should download the chef-server-core package, and not run the installer. dvm will then look for the package in either the Downloads dir on your machine or the omnibus/pkg directory under the chef-server repo where dvm is running. You can also set the INSTALLER environment variable to tell dvm where to find the package if it is not in one of those locations.
• A text editor on your machine.
• Any time you're doing something with 'dvm' on the VM, make sure you've acquired root by using sudo -i. Otherwise dvm won't be in your path.

Go!

cd dev
vagrant up
./sync

In a separate terminal session/pane/window:

vagrant ssh
sudo -i
dvm quickstart oc_erchef

What can I do?

Start editing erchef files, pedant files, cookbooks, upgrade definitions, and/or chef-server-ctl commands.

• Changes to erchef erlang files will be picked up and recompiled automatically shortly after you save them on the host.
• To pick up cookbook changes, run chef-server-ctl reconfigure in the VM.
• upgrades and chef-server-ctl command changes/additions will be available very quickly after you save them on the host (< 5 seconds)
• To run pedant tests in the VM, use dvm run oc-chef-pedant. You can also provide the usual flags, eg dvm run oc-chef-pedant --focus-/skip-X, --smoke, --all, etc.

dvm has support for many projects including bifrost and bookshelf. Use dvm list to see them all.

While all host changes are replicated to the dev vm only erlang projects support automatic hot compile and reload of changed modules on the host. To whatever extent supported by the language, we'll be adding the same for ruby service-based projects.

Dependency Loading

If you find that you need to change an erlang project dependency, dvm simplifies that too. For example, let's say we want to modify chef_authn and pull it into the running erchef instance:

# From in the vm. assumes sudo -i
dvm load oc_erchef chef_authn

This will clone chef_authn onto your host[1], where you can begin editing it. It will link it into the project deps directory and hot-load it into the running VM[2]. This is available for nearly all dependencies declared in a project's rebar.config.

[1] NOTE: Presently this will clone into chef-server directory. We will be fixing this, it's a side effect of the recent project merge. [2] There is currently a limitation here in that the owning project must be running to pick up the changes. We will be fixing that shortly.

For a list of dependencies available for loading and their current status, use dvm list $PROJECTNAME. Any dependency that is not a system library and declared in a project's app.src is typically available.

Ruby project dependency loading support coming soon.

Coverage Analysis

Erlang has built-in support for code coverage analaysis which will evaluate how often each line of code in erlang modules is hit. To enable this for a full project, use:

dvm cover PROJECT enable

To enable it for a specific module, use:

dvm cover PROJECT enable MODULE_NAME

To reset coverage stats for one or all modules:

dvm cover PROJECT reset [MODULE_NAME]

To write coverage results to file (chef-server/testdata/coverage) use:

dvm cover PROJECT report [MODULE_NAME]

And finally to disable coverage and re-enable automatic code sync:

dvm cover PROJECT disable

Note that enabling cover will disable automatic compile and load of changed modules, and disabling it will turn that back on.

Not So Quick Start

TODO: details of components, terminology, etc. explore more dvm commands?

Test Data

[pending] If you want to load in test users, orgs, and nodes for testing outside of pedant, you can:

dvm populate

TODO: Provide a canned set of test data in ec-backup form for more thorough tests?

dvm

At the heart of all this is the 'dvm' tool. This tool is used to manage the environment from within the vm. It must always be run as root, and to be sure that the environment is correct, use sudo -i to become root to run it.

The intention here was to create a simple way to do all the common activities:

• load a project
• run a test suite or subset thereof
• run a project and/or start a loaded service
• open a console to a running erlang app
• etop a running erlang app
• access the DB for a project

And a few other things. You can just use dvm by itself and a list of commands will be generated. You may also want to take a look in defaults.yml, in which project definitions and other things are set up.