AppSuite:Deployment with Chef for Raspbian

Raspberry Pi singlenode deployment

Introduction

This setup will allow you to automatically install the Open-Xchange AppSuite to a Raspberry Pi 3.

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi 3
• External SSD
• Everything to run a Raspberry properly (Power supply, MircoSD Card, etc.)
• MicroSD adapter

Why do you need a SSD? A normal SD Card is quite limited in lifetime and an SSD is much faster.

Preparation

First, we need the MicroSD to have a bootable Raspbian image written onto it. If you bought a complete bundle you may have gotten a card that is already prepared. If so, feel free to skip the next steps. If not, the first step is to create such a card. Please check the official raspberry pi guides for this.

When your SD Card is ready, plug it in along with all of your periphery, and boot the Pi up. If all went well your screen should show a menu where you can choose to install Raspbian. After the installation, download this script

wget https://software.open-xchange.com/raspbian/SD2SSD.sh

to the raspberry pi. Start a shell session on the pi, navigate to the script and execute it AS ROOT.

sudo bash SD2SSD.sh

Follow the instructions provided by the script and reboot your Pi after the script has finished. Now, your Raspberry Pi will Boot from SSD. You can confirm this by taking a look into the file manager.

Chef

Now, that the Pi boots from SSD we are able to start our OX installation.

Go to the computer which you want to start the installation to the raspberry. Visit chef.io and download/install the appropriate chef-dk for your operating system.

lgrunau@open-xchange:~$ sudo dpkg -i chefdk.deb

Also please install kitchen-ssh gem.

lgrunau@open-xchange:~$ gem install kitchen-ssh

To verify the installation, type;

lgrunau@open-xchange:~$ chef verify

Git

All of our cookbooks are versioned via git, so you'll need to have git installed.

lgrunau@open-xchange:~$ sudo apt-get install git

Deploy from cookbook

Get cookbooks from git

lgrunau@open-xchange:~$ git clone https://code.open-xchange.com/git/deployment/raspbian

Update cookbooks from git

lgrunau@open-xchange:~$ git pull
lgrunau@open-xchange:~$ berks update

Edit preferences

To edit your preferences, navigate to the .kitchen.yml file and set the hostname, username and password to your variables.

lgrunau@open-xchange:~$ vim .kitchen.yml

Deploy

Deploying the software is quite simple. Just type;

lgrunau@open-xchange:~$ kitchen converge default-pi

Now, chef will create a connection to your raspberry pi, will log on and execute the cookbook.

For a complete explaination what chef does, please take a look at the official chef documentation.