A kitchen for your server

I have a few bare servers lying around, pre-installed with Ubuntu, not integrated in any chef/puppte/saltstack workflow, with a lot of power ready to go. They are a perfect place for some labour-intensive vagrant boxes, which have recently been eating up my SSD. Due to the lack of bootstrap, I have found myself installing and configuring the same components one too many times.

At this point I decided to revisit knife solo and take it out for a spin. The result is kitchen-server, an easy way to configure a server and make it your second home away from home.

The only requirement to get started is knife-solo.

gem install knife-solo

Let’s say my server is running at 192.168.200.204. I have the user ubuntu preconfigured and ready to go (with ssh key on server). The basic setup is as easy as:

git clone https://github.com/arlimus/kitchen-server
cd kitchen-server

./setup.sh ubuntu@192.168.200.204

ssh knife@192.168.200.204

I tend to use the extended version, to have zsh and git configured:

./setup.sh ubuntu@192.168.200.204 ext

ssh katana@192.168.200.204

The kitchen itself is simply a configuration stack on top of many great cookbooks out there. The default configuration will get you started with vagrant quickly and easily. Feel free to fork and edit it as you like.