I’ve been working a lot with RPi’s lately. Since I don’t have a lot of time when I am doing side projects, I need to maximize my efficiency. A while back, I looked into using Chef to manage my raspberry pi’s, so that I could have a delivery platform at home, not just another task to do by hand.

I have not really been blown away by what was already out there. Andy Thompson did a really great writeup on how to do this with knife. While I have knife installed now for work, I don’t really enjoy the process of getting Ruby installed on a mac fresh, and didn’t want to go down that path. In addition, you end up managing each raspberry pi directly in the end by ssh-ing into the pi and updating the solo.json.

Jo Liss has a great writeup on how to manage a single server with chef. Now this one is close. The only issues I found is that I’d like it to be able to manage a group of servers, and that post is fairly old, so the code no longer works.

So I created a github project which allows me (or anyone) to manage a few different servers from one location using chef solo. It also runs a newer version of chef, and works perfectly on the raspberry pi. You can check it out at https://github.com/jeremyno/chef-solo-infrastructure.

I generally hate GPL (toxic), but I did GPL’d the code nonetheless. That may change someday.

I expect I will wind up writing more on this/using it in projects to come. Stay tuned.