David Golden reported:
Cooking Perl with Chef Grant Completion Report
I am pleased to report the completion of my TPF grant, "Cooking Perl with Chef".
The goal of this grant was to create ready-to-use tools and supporting tutorials that teach Perl developers (and the sysadmins that support them) how to deploy Perl applications repeatable and reliably using the Chef configuration management tool.
In the section of the original proposal on my motivations for this grant, I talked about the "black art" of automated deployment:
Automated configuration management tools are increasingly part of the toolbox for Internet technology companies, but support for Perl and Perl application frameworks lags behind other dynamic languages. This makes Perl harder to integrate into an environment that already uses such tools and makes it harder for Perl-oriented companies to adopt such tools.
While these difficulties can be overcome, deploying Perl applications with configuration management tools remains an idiosyncratic black art, with the knowledge of how to do it locked up in the minds (or companies) that have done it. For someone new to configuration management, the learning curve is steep.
I sincerely hope that the deliverables from this grant can serve as a foundation for the Perl community to continue to share tools, techniques and practices.
As I mentioned in my last report, there is now a Perl Devops mailing list to serve a community forum for discussing deployment tools and practices. If you are interested, please email perl-devops-subscribe@perl.org and help jump start some conversations.
I would like to thank The Perl Foundation (and those who contribute to it) for their support of this grant.
Summary of the deliverables
Code deliverables
- Publish a Chef cookbook for Perl interpreter deployment
- Publish a Chef cookbook for CPAN module deployment (included in the previous cookbook)
- Publish a Chef cookbook for Plack application deployment
- Improve the Pantry command line tool
The cookbooks are available via the Perl Chef website and the Opscode community cookbook website. Pantry is available on CPAN.
Teaching deliverables
- Presentation-style Introduction to Perl and Chef
- Document-style Hello World tutorial with step-by-step instructions
- Hello World tutorial screencast demonstration
- Document-style Real World tutorial with step-by-step instructions
The teaching deliverables are also linked on Perl Chef.
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