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Keeping up with Sprout-Wrap

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Keeping your sprout-wrap recipes and cookbooks up to date is a good thing to do! It keeps your software secure (because bugs like Heartbleed happen), and it allows your developers to enjoy improving their workstation workflow and processes with the most recent software and tools.

Sprout-wrap has been a moving target lately, and has undergone some recent growing pains. Many cookbooks have moved, and as a result your old recipes and cookbooks will grow stale unless you change your Cheffile and soloistrc file to point to the newest cookbooks and recipes. The good news is, this should be a one time “upgrade.” After pointing towards the newest cookbooks a simple librarian-chef update will suffice for keeping up to date. This blog post will hold your hand while you perform this one-time upgrade, as I found it to be a bit tricky!

Upgrade sprout-osx-base to sprout-base first

If you’re using the sprout-osx-base cookbook, it has been renamed, and this proves to be tricky when there are dependencies from external cookbooks.

Add sprout-base to your Cheffile, and keep the old sprout-osx-base cookbook there for now.

cookbook 'sprout-base',
  :git => 'git://github.com/pivotal-sprout/sprout-base.git'

cookbook 'sprout-osx-base',
  :git => 'git://github.com/pivotal-sprout/sprout-base.git'

Adding sprout-base and sprout-osx-base to your Cheffile will allow for your cookbooks to be backwards compatible. If old cookbooks reference sprout-osx-base, their dependencies will resolve properly. Similarly, when new cookbooks reference sprout-base they will resolve to those same recipes. We’ll remove the sprout-osx-base cookbook at the end.

Try running a librarian-chef install. If the cookbooks have been extracted to separate git repositories already you’ll see an error message like this:

No metadata file found for rubymine from git://github.com/pivotal-sprout/sprout.git#master(sprout-osx-rubymine)! If this should be a cookbook, you might consider contributing a metadata file upstream or forking the cookbook to add your own metadata file.

This means that the cookbook has been moved. For sprout-osx-rubymine you can replace this code piece in your Cheffile

cookbook 'rubymine',
  :git => 'git://github.com/pivotal-sprout/sprout.git',
  :path => 'sprout-osx-rubymine'

with

cookbook 'sprout-rubymine',
  :git => 'git://github.com/pivotal-sprout/sprout-rubymine.git

Okay, now that we’ve managed to do a libarian-chef install, try running a bundle exec soloist. During cookbook compilation, you’ll notice that some cookbooks aren’t found. That’s because some recipes have moved to their own dedicated cookbook. In soloistrc where you once had both sprout-osx-apps::rubymine and sprout-osx-apps::rubymine_preferences we can now simply say sprout-rubymine::default.

Dedicated Cookbooks

You should take a moment to read through the sprout-rubymine::default recipe, as it might have changed slightly. Dedicated cookbooks allow our recipes to remain simple, the cookbooks dependencies remain more explicit, and the seperation of concerns more defined. It makes testing these cookbooks much easier (you are testing your cookbooks, right?). In rubymine’s case, we can focus on installation and managing it’s preferences. Simple!

Here is a list of the dedicated cookbooks for sprout-wrap that you’ll want to be using to be up to date with sprout-wrap development.

  • Git
  • Homebrew
  • Terminal
  • Vim
  • Mysql / Postgres
  • Rbenv
  • Rubymine
  • OSX Settings

Now that we’ve moved all of our recipes to their dedicated cookbooks, hopefully you can do a successful run of bundle exec soloist. We can start upgrading our cookbooks now. Let’s try upgrading one cookbook at a time:

bundle exec librarian-chef update sprout-pivotal

Try running soloist again on your machine to ensure that all of the recipes you’ve been using are still working on your current machine. You can look farther down in the troubleshooting section to see how to resolve numerous issues you may commonly hit.

Now that you’ve gotten past upgrading one cookbook, you can go through and upgrade each one sequentially. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can do so with a simple librarian-chef update. At this point, I’d like to note that I have found that librarian-chef update --verbose to be extremely helpful in understanding why the error messages are happening, and troubleshoot accordingly.

Remove pivotal-workstation cookbook

The pivotal-workstation cookbook was the first generation of sprout-wrap. It’s recipes are continually being deprecated, and support for them is dwindling (if not already dead.) The recipes that are in your soloistrc file have been ported over to other individual cookbooks.

You can see how I removed the pivotal-workstation cookbook here.

After you remove the pivotal-workstation cookbook from your Cheffile, you’ll notice that all of your dependnecies on the sprout-osx-base cookbook have gone away. Go ahead and remove the following lines from your Cheffile.

cookbook 'sprout-osx-base',
  :git => 'git://github.com/pivotal-sprout/sprout-base.git'

Sprout-wrapping it up

Alright! Nice work. Looks like you’re all up to date with sprout-wrap now. Going forward it will be much easier to upgrade, thankfully. A simple librarian-chef update will definitely be enough to keep your machine’s Chef recipes up to date.