I spoke this week at ChefConf about how we use Chef at my company to produce an installer for our on-premises product. Slides for the talk are up, but not very useful without my rambling that went with them. Instead of making attendees madly write down the resources slide, here are links to the resources and tools I mentioned in the talk.

• Vagrant from Mitchell Hashimoto and Hashicorp. We use Vagrant in our chef repo to spin up a VM for each of our node types and perform chef runs to populate caches of things retrieved from the network.
• vagrant-cachier by Fabio Rehm is used for centralizing the node’s Chef cache into a single shared folder located in the chef repo. We do not use it for caching APT packages.
• apt-cacher-ng (ACNG) is what we use for caching APT packages. On one node at chef compile time, ACNG is installed and configured. All nodes are configured to apt-get with the ACNG node as their proxy. After a successful convergence on all nodes, the ACNG cache of downloaded packages is copied into the chef repo.
• fpm by Jordan Sissel is the wonderment with which we package our own components and package up the chef repo with a chef installer and the populated caches. Super time saver for producing a variety of package formats.
• knife-solo by Mat Schaffer was not explicitly mentioned in the talk, but gets a shout out at the end and here. knife-solo has made our lives easier by letting us get our chef repo up onto test and staging servers and starting a chef run is out chef-solo-oriented world.