Setting up Chef/Rails/Ubuntu

Question

I am a bit new in devOps - working with Rails. I have successfully created a Vagrant/Chef configuration to replicate my development local VM machine, but now I am trying to deploy the same settings on a Digital Ocean VPS that I connect obviously by ssh.

It's a bit confusing how to trigger chef-solo from "inside" the vm without the need of an external server. I actually have one VPS for now. I am pushing my Chef files to github, then clone them from inside the remote development VPS and run chef-solo.

Steps I've followed:

• Installed Chef-DK
• Added some cookbooks inside Berksfile
• Did a berks install and then a berks vendor cookbooks to create everything inside ./cookbooks

• Created a solo.rb file

  cookbook_path File.join(File.dirname(File.expand_path(__FILE__)), "cookbooks")
  json_attribs File.join(File.dirname(File.expand_path(__FILE__)), "node.json")
  

• Then a node.json file:

  {
     "run_list": [
       "recipe[main]",
       "recipe[apt]",
       "recipe[nginx]",
       "recipe[postgresql]",
       "recipe[git]",
       "recipe[ruby_build]",
       "recipe[rvm]",
       "recipe[rails]",
       "recipe[bundler]",
       "recipe[nodejs]"
       ]
  }
  

• Then a metadata.rb file in the root of my tree structure:

  name             'test'
   maintainer       'Me Myself'
   maintainer_email 'me@myself.com'
   license          'All rights reserved'
   description      'Installs/Configures test'
   long_description 'Installs/Configures test'
   version          '0.1.0'
   depends 'apt', '~> 2.6.1'
   depends 'nginx', '~> 2.7.6'
   depends 'postgresql'
   depends 'git', '~> 4.3.3'
   depends 'build-essential'
   depends 'ruby_build', '~> 0.8.0'
   depends 'rvm', '~> 0.9.4'
   depends 'rails', '~> 0.9.2'
   depends 'bundler', '~> 0.2.0'
   depends 'nodejs', '~> 2.4.2'
  

• And finally I executed:

  sudo chef-solo -c solo.rb -j node.json

My questions:

• How does this procedure look to you ? Am I missing something ? Any good/common practices ?
• The cookbooks folder is deleted and re-generated when I execute berks.. Am I doing something wrong ? If not,
• What is the meaning of tweaking the default.rb file in each cookbook to customise ? For example, I want to install Ruby 2.2.2 with RVM.
• depends doesn't seem to install cookbooks. I needed to add them inside node.jsonin order for them to work because I was getting a 'Failed dependencies' message. Why?

Any ideas/opinions will be appreciated :)