tl;dr: You are a few clicks away from a configurable chef script for your OS-X development machine.
Many teams use chef to manage their production machines, but developers often build their development boxes by hand. SoloWizard makes it painless to create a configurable chef solo script to get your development machine humming: mysql, sublime text, .bash_profile tweaks to OS-X settings - it's all there!
Dependencies: Xcode and OS-X Mountain Lion (read the faq for more details)
create your personal Solo Wizard script:
Select which recipes you'd like to use and then click the button - we will build a chef script for you, which you can bookmark or share with others.
FAQ
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Q:How does it work?A:SoloWizard is built ontop of 3 popular and well supported open source projects: Chef Solo, the pivotal_workstation cookbook, and the soloist gem. Soloist allows you to create chef-solo scripts with less boilerplate. SoloWizard builds you a "Soloist shell script" which uses the pivotal_workstation chef recipes.
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Q:Do I need to have Xcode installed and be running on Mountain Lion?A:Sorta.
Xcode: Many of the recipes use homebrew which require some utilites your mac doesn't have by default. You have 2 options: install Xcode from the App Store, or install the Xcode Command Line Tools from Apple's developer site. Xcode is a whopping 5GB's, so the command line tools are a faster download, but if you are interested in iPhone development, I would just go with Xcode. Its up to you!
To install Xcode: (Demo video at 1:58 to see steps 3 and 4)
- Download Xcode from the Mac App Store
- Open it and accept the terms
- Go to Xcode > Preferences
- On the "Downloads" tab, find "Command Line Tools" in the "Components" section. Install it
To install the Xcode Command Line Tools directly, here's a good instructional blog article.
Mountain Lion: The most up-to-date pivotal_workstation recipes are only compatible with Mountain Lion. If you are on Lion and are willing to run recipes which are no longer supported, here are the steps:
- Make sure you don't have any recipes checked which aren't present on the "last_lion_release" tag: view the last_lion_release recipes
- Create a Solo Wizard script like normal
- Download the Solo Wizard shell script locally.
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Add the following line right before the line which has "soloist":
cd pivotal_workstation && git checkout last_lion_release && cd ..
- Run the script and hope for the best!
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Q:Can I run Solo Wizard multiple times?A:Sure! You'll have the most up-to-date chef recipes either way!
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Q:Wait, you want me to run a terminal command which executes code that is being downloading from your site.... isn't that unsafe?A:Some developers feel very strongly about this and some don't. So I give you both options: an easy one liner you can copy and paste -or- a link to download the script to your hard drive. Either way, I invite you to examine the shell script which Solo Wizard creates, it's the same as the pivotal_workstation usage documentation.