The Buttso Blathers: 2014.12

11 December 2014

Exploring DevOps with Chef and WebLogic Server

I'm about to embark on a journey that explores the use of WebLogic Server within a DevOps regime. My first port of call for this journey will be using Chef.

A loose travel itinerary is:

Setting up an environment to explore the basic operations of Chef - using the Chef Development Kit (ChefDK)
Exploring the basics of how Chef works to install Java and WebLogic Server on a single node
Installing and examining some of the existing cookbooks that are available for Java and WebLogic Server
Extending the environment to provision multiple nodes to create a typical multiple machine clustered WebLogic Server environment

I've started working on the first task, where I've also explored using Docker to create an isolated, reusable and easily shareable environment that contains the ChefDK.

The Docker project is here on GitHub:

https://github.com/buttso/chef-docker

I also tried a quick experiment with using Oracle Linux as the base docker image:

https://github.com/buttso/chef-docker-ol

The Dockerfile contains the set of instructions required to install the ChefDK and the necessary utilities into the docker image when it is built.

#
# Dockerfile for Chef 4 WLS Environment 
# 

FROM ubuntu

MAINTAINER Steve Button <>

ENV     DEBIAN_FRONTEND noninteractive

# Install Utilities
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -yq wget
RUN apt-get install -yq curl
RUN apt-get install -yq git

# Install Chef
RUN wget https://opscode-omnibus-packages.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/12.04/x86_64/chefdk_0.3.5-1_amd64.deb
RUN dpkg -i chefdk*.deb

# Verify and Setup Chef
RUN chef verify 
RUN echo 'eval "$(chef shell-init bash)"' << ~/.bashrc

...

CMD ["/bin/bash"]

With this Dockerfile a build operation can be performed that produces a docker image, which can then be run to provide an environment in which start exploring the Chef.

$ docker build -t buttso/chef4wls .

$ docker run -ti buttso/chef4wls

oracle@5481a3330f27:~$ which chef-client
/opt/chefdk/embedded/bin/chef-client

This is just a brief outline - I will describe this first task in more detail once I get a bit further along and can verify everything has been installed and works correctly.