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I'm using Vagrant + Chef (chef_client provisioner) to create & provision a staging environment for my server. And I have a Jenkins job set up that is run every time I push to my 'develop' branch.

In the Jenkins job, I would like to update & rebuild the source code of the server in the staging box and restart it.

I have already written the cookbooks that install the dependencies, configure the db etc. But I'm not sure how to run only the update & rebuild & restart stuff from the cookbooks. I understand I could always tear down the whole box and rebuild it, but provisioning the box is a lengthy process so I would like to do that as little as possible.

I split my server cookbook into 3 recipes: dependencies, db_setup and server. What I want to run in the my Jenkins job is the "server" recipe only. But I dont' understand how can I do that... If I specify the run_list on my Chef server, then I lose the ability to provision the whole box from scratch.

Basically, I would like to be able to tell Vagrant from the command line what recipes Chef should run. Is that possible somehow?

Cheers!

Tomas Brambora
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1 Answers1

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Chef resources are supposed to be idempotent so you should be able to run chef-client over and over without having software re-installed unless there is actually a change that you want. You can create your chef-recipe to only do a new build of the code if there is a change from the last time it was run.

So you can have a recipe that only does the update & rebuild if there is a change and then in the rebuild part you can do a notifies :restart on all of the relevant services (that is the process I am following right now).

See this answer for more details on idempotence and repetetive invocations of chef https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4913521/chef-repetitive-recipe-execution

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JoseM
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