chef-alfresco has a new home!

[mpillitu]

Important Disclaimer!

Chef-alfresco is part of the Alfresco Community offering thus is not supported.

It is not guaranteed to work and we are not accountable for any problem it may cause in your running environments.

You can use it at your own risk and you are welcome to help the testing and development by reporting issues

After 30 months of development and 30 releases, chef-alfresco have been moved under the Alfresco umbrella; if you want to have an overview of Alfresco deployment challenges, you can checkout the presentation at Summit 2014

As part of the Alfresco Devops team, I have been working on chef-alfresco project, aiming at the following high-level goals:

• Easy to use deployment tool that can be simple to test by (Chef) users

• Extended library of deployment tools that can be used either to create immutable images or to perform installations on pre-existing environments

• Tested against CentOS platform (apologies to Ubuntu users for possible regressions from previous versions)

• Feature-rich, covering the most frequent Community and Enterprise installation use-cases

To give you an idea of chef-alfresco features, here's the complete list of components you can use right now:

• tomcat: installs Apache Tomcat; it supports single or multi-homed installation

• repo: installs and configures Alfresco Repository webapp and all its related plugins

• transform: installs all 3rd party software needed by Alfresco (swftools, libreoffice, imagemagick, OS fonts)

• share: installs and configures Alfresco Share webapp and all its related plugins

• solr: installs and configures Alfresco Solr webapp

• haproxy: installs Haproxy and configures it to proxy Tomcat instance(s) to /share and /alfresco paths

• nginx: installs Nginx and configures it to proxy Haproxy and apply SSL Offloading

• mysql: installs and configures a MySQL server local instance. It also creates database and user to run Alfresco against it

• rm: installs Alfresco Records Management extension (AMP)

• googledocs: installs Alfresco GoogleDocs extension (AMP)

• aos: installs and configures Alfresco Office Services (enterprise-only)

And this is the direction we want to take in the short-mid term:

• media-management integration (MUST)

• reporting&analytics integration (MUST)

• postgresql integration (SHOULD)

• Ubuntu compatibility (COULD)

• Windows compatibility (WOULD)

In the long term we aim to contribute chef-alfresco to Chef Supermarket.

Are you using Chef to deploy Alfresco? We would love to hear from you how to improve chef-alfresco and meet your needs; just drop a comment here or open issues.