Toque - The Cap of a Chef

Toque combines the power of chef-solo and capistrano. It allows you to run chef cookbooks with chef-solo as part of your capistrano deploy process.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'toque'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install toque

After capifying your project add to your Capfile:

require 'toque'

You can install chef by running cap toque:chef:install otherwise it will be installed on first run_list call. Toque uses chef omnibus installer to install a complete self-contained embedded chef environment.

You can specify a specific chef version by setting :chef_version to something different to nil. If an already installed chef with a different version exists toque will run omnibus installer with specified version to override installed chef.

See cap toque:config for more options.

Toque assumes your cookbooks to be in config/cookbooks or vendor/cookbooks. One way is to use config/cookbooks for your own application cookbook(s) and vendor/cookbooks for community cookbooks managed by librarian-chef.

You can configure librarian-chef to use vendor/cookbooks as cookbook path:

$ librarian-chef config path ./vendor/cookbooks --local

In your deploy configuration you can now run toque.run_list with a list of recipes you want to execute. You can run chef more then once with different list.

For example if you want to setup the server before deploying your app run your setup recipe right at the start:

before "deploy:update_code" do
  toque.run_list 'recipe[awesome::setup]'
end

After deploying your app you may need to create a config for your application like database.yml or redis configuration:

after "deploy:create_symlink" do
  toque.run_list 'recipe[awesome::configure]'
end

By default all capistrano options are available in your node configuration:

# config/deploy.rb

set :application, 'awesomeium'
set :deploy_to, "/var/www/#{application}"
set :user, 'awesomeix'

# config/cookbooks/awesome/recipes/configure.rb

template File.join(node[:deploy_to], 'config', 'database.yml') do
  source 'database.yml.erb'
  owner node[:user]
  recursive true
end

$ bundle exec cap toque:config
  * 2013-04-08 09:02:33 executing `toque:config'
set :chef_debug,                   false
set :chef_omnibus_installer_url,   "http://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh"
set :chef_solo,                    "/opt/chef/bin/chef-solo"
set :chef_version,                 "10.24.0"
set :cookbooks_paths,              ["config/cookbooks", "vendor/cookbooks"]
set :databags_path,                "config/databags"
set :toque_pwd,                    "/tmp/toque"

Thanks to roundsman doing even some more tasks like installing ruby and chef via rubygems. I've decided to make up something new to use omnibus installer right from the start.

Also take a look at capistrano-spec allowing some really great capistrano testing.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

You can run a simple vagrant based test by running bundle exec rspec spec/spec_toque.rb.