Cooking Perl with Chef - Grant Report #4

David Golden reported:

Overview

For those wondering about (the lack) of updates on this grant, I'm pleased to be back with some significant progress on the teaching deliverables. Some circumstances in my personal life required me to put the grant on the back burner during June, but July and OSCON-centered conference-driven development have allowed me to rebuild some momentum.

In particular, I have three things to announce:

• perlchef.com is now live. This site provides easy access to all the code and teaching deliverables for this grant. Over time, I hope it will continue to grow and provide more resources to the community.
• The three "Hello World" teaching deliverables are now live. The Cooking Perl with Chef presentation expands on the material I presented at OSCON. The tutorial and screencast show command-by-command how to deploy a simple server.
• The newly created perl-devops@perl.org mailing list is a community forum for discussing deployment tools and practices. If you care about this, please subscribe (and start sharing questions or practices).

Together, I hope these can be a foundation for continuing to improve deployment practices beyond the end of this grant.

Current progress on deliverables

Six of the eight deliverables are complete and a seventh is substantially complete.

Code deliverables

• Publish a Chef cookbook for Perl interpreter deployment (100%)
• Publish a Chef cookbook for CPAN module deployment (100%)
• Publish a Chef cookbook for Plack application deployment (100%)
• Improve the Pantry command line tool (90% complete; multi-environment support pending)

Teaching deliverables

• Presentation-style introduction to Perl and Chef (100%)
• Document-style "Hello World" tutorial with step-by-step instructions (100%)
• Screencast of "Hello World" tutorial demonstration (100%)
• Document-style "Real World" tutorial with step-by-step instructions (0%)

Current work and next steps

Given the June delay, I'm now exploring whether Jitterbug is a better option for a real-world demo, where "better" means I can complete the grant quickly while still providing useful insights for real world deployment. If so, I'll be adapting and extending the existing tutorial to demonstrate this bigger task.

Over the next week, I will also be adding support for deployment environments to Pantry, which would complete the remaining code deliverable.