I guess its for the best, but I think that the difficulty of sharing individual cookbooks as git-repos is a major short comming of Chef right now.

I like the vendor branch pattern pretty much.. The plugin knife-github-cookbooks is helpful

And yes agreed, ‘mkdir -p’ is super handy. 🙂

I don’t know, that’s one of my favorite tricks. Most people don’t know about {foo,bar,baz} in shell scripts and command line shortcuts. And mkdir -p is generally awesome.

mkdir -p site-cookbooks/wordpress/{recipes,attributes,templates/default}

…although I guess that is no longer considered best practice, as you stated. 🙂

Thanks for getting back on this.. I will try to look into the ‘knife cookbook site install…’ approach.

Cheers.

Yeah, this is a new thing. They are depreciating the pattern that I described where you have a chef_repo/cookbooks and chef_repo/site-cookbooks and that you can over-ride / customize cookbooks that are in chef_repo/cookbooks with files in the same directory structure as a cookbook in chef_repo/site-cookbooks.

Opsocde is promoting the use of the knife cookbook site install to implement the git vendor branch pattern as the way to create local changes to standard cookbooks…

That’s a whole ‘nother blog post someday…

Don’t know if you figured it out or not. I don’t know specificly why, but you can see if the /etc/sudoers got configured as expected. There is a slight danger that if the recipe screws up, it could lock you out of sudo access of the instance. (I.e. if it removes the entry for the Ubuntu user or removes the setting for NOPASSWORD for Ubuntu.) The only way I know to recover from that would be to shutdown the instance and mount the ebs root volume on another instance, and fix it. That only works if the original instace was an EBS backed instance and not a SPOT instance.

Otherwise, assuming you were just going thru the tutorial, start over…

But it would be good to look at the /etc/sudoers and see that it has all your users and it has them set for NOPASSWORD.

Thanks for the tutorial. Really helped… everything seems to work except for the sudo cookbook part. When I follow the instructions for that and include it in my role all users seem to ask for passwords, including the ubuntu user.

Any ideas ?

Thanks for your help.

BTW – did you also see this warning at the beginning?
WARNING: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
WARNING: The cookbooks: sudo, wordpress exist in multiple places in your cookbook_path.
A composite version of these cookbooks has been compiled for uploading.

IMPORTANT: In a future version of Chef, this behavior will be removed and you will no longer
be able to have the same version of a cookbook in multiple places in your cookbook_path.
WARNING: The affected cookbooks are located:
sudo:
/home/robert/chef-repo/cookbooks/sudo
/home/robert/chef-repo/site-cookbooks/sudo
wordpress:
/home/robert/chef-repo/cookbooks/wordpress
/home/robert/chef-repo/site-cookbooks/wordpress

You bring up a good point. By default, if the EC2 instance is terminated, the attached EBS volumes will also be terminated. But you can change that behvior when you create the instance or after you create the instance. The latest versions of the knife ec2 server create command now have an argument to set things so that the ebs volume will NOT be deleted automatically. I am changing the document to show that.

You can also change the behavior at any time after the instance has been created. But there is no way I know of to do it with a GUI. The AWS Console, Ylastic and ElasticFox don’t expose that feature. So the only way I know of to set the existing EBS volume to disable the default “Delete on Termination” is to use the ec2-api-tools Command Line tools. A great article on this is Three Ways to Protect EC2 Instances from Accidental Termination and Loss of Data by the ever educational Eric Hammond His site, Alestic, is great resource for Ubuntu on EC2.

The important bit in this article is:
ec2-modify-instance-attribute --block-device-mapping /dev/sda1=::false i-d10ae5bd where i-d10ae5bd is the instance id of your AWS EC2 instance. You would have gotten that from the output of the original knife ec2 server create command or at any time using the AWS Console for EC2.

Instructions for installing and basic usage of AWS ec2-api-tools:
AWS EC2 API Tools Home
Ubuntu
General Linux
Macintosh
I don’t do Windows. You’ll have to Google or I supose Bing it