chef cpan cookbook

[melezhik]

In this post I want to share my chef cookbook called cpan. Chef is the modern platform for deploy automation and configuration. One of chef great feature - one may create custom recipes to deploy/configure specific applications, written on any languages. When I first met with chef, I had already had some experience on deploying perl applications. I used standard build cycle:

perl Build.PL
./Build 
./Build installdeps
./Build test
./Build install

So the idea of integrating perl application install come into my mind in natural way.

With cpan cookbook one may do standard perl build/test/install idioms using chef. Here I am putting some use cases, just to give some sense of what it is. If you like it, you may learn more on http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/cpan.

Cpan cookbook use cases

Installing application, distributed with tar-ball. Let's say you have already fetch and store tar-ball with others chef resources (the following code is self-explanatory). So you may easily install it into given install base:

remote_file '/tmp/app-0.0.1.tag.gz'
    source 'http://local.server/app-0.0.1.tag.gz'
end

execute 'cd /tmp/ && tar -xzf app.tag.gz'

cpan_client 'my application' do
    user 'root'
    group 'root'
    install_type 'application'
    action 'install'
    install_base '/path/to/your/application/home'
    cwd '/tmp/app-0.0.1'    
end

The same thing with your perl5lib paths taking into account ('/home/user/alex/perl5lib/'):

cpan_client 'my application' do
    user 'root'
    group 'root'
    install_type 'application'
    action 'install'
    install_base '/path/to/your/application/home'
    cwd '/tmp/app-0.0.1'
    inc  %w{ /home/user/alex/perl5lib/ }
end

If you need just installing arbitrary cpan module, here some examples to start. Install by given link:

cpan_client "http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/M/MA/MARKSTOS/CGI.
+pm-3.59.tar.gz" do
    user 'root'
    group 'root'
    module_name 'CGI'
    action 'install'
end

Or just rely on your cpan mirrors:

cpan_client 'CGI' do
    user 'root'
    group 'root'
    install_type 'cpan_module'
    action 'install'
end

With cpan cookbooks you may even play with version requirements. Require minimal version:

cpan_client 'CGI' do
    user 'root'
    group 'root'
    version '3.55' 
    install_type 'cpan_module'
    action 'install'
end

Do not install if already installed:

cpan_client 'CGI' do
    user 'root'
    group 'root'
    version '0' 
    install_type 'cpan_module'
    action 'install'
end

Try to upgrade to highest possible version:

cpan_client 'CGI' do
    user 'root'
    group 'root'
    install_type 'cpan_module'
    action 'install'
end

If you install by distributive, you may even require concrete version:

cpan_client 'http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/M/MA/MARKSTOS/CGI.
+pm-3.59.tar.gz' do
    user 'root'
    group 'root'
    module_name 'CGI'
    version '=3.59'
    action 'install'
end

Other examples to check out is on http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/cpan.