Here's the scenario:
I can SSH into my Chef-Server . But I can't SSH into any of the Chef-Clients. So this is how I work : I have a workstation to change or create Roles . All the chef-clients are running as daemons , so when they wake up , they notice state changes and start updating themselves .
Now , I need to configure code deployments on these clients . I was thinking I could use application cookbook for that , and add recipes to the roles using my workstation . But won't that result in deployments every time the chef-clients wake up and find revision changes ? I want an On Demand kind of deployment : I want to deploy only when the code is deployment ready , not for any other commit till that point .
How do I achieve this ?
Couple of questions
When id your code deployment ready? How would you know? If it's a repeatable process could you not code that into a recipe? if it's not a repeatable process you need to make it one so that it can be automated
IE run cucumber tests and if they all pass then deploy else just do nothing?
We feed from Artifactory and use the web api to check the latest installer available to us. If it's the same as previously installed (done by checking/creating a registry key) we say to the user, this build is already installed so we're skipping. If it's not the same we install. Now I know this isn't the exact same scenario but it feels to me like some custom code is going to be needed here.
Either that or leverage databag values to say install=true or false depending on the state of the code. You would update project a's install item in the databag when you want to deploy and the rest of the time it's set to false. The recipe would only proceed if the value was true?
Why not have a branch where HEAD is always ready to be deployed? Only push to this branch when your code is ready to go out into the world. Then you don't have to worry about intermediate, unstable states of your repository being synced by chef. Of course, you still have to wait for a client to wake up and sync before you see your changes, so if latency is a problem this won't work.
