Mcollective has been able to fire up puppetd runs for a while now, via a standalone RPC call or through the puppet commander binary (check it out, spread your load). I wanted to be able to fire up my chef clients with mcollective, to use metadata to filter what should be impacted. So I wrote a little piece of ruby, mostly based on the puppet one, to achieve this. You can now do the following :

mco rpc chef runonce or  mco rpc chef status
The plugin is available on my github mcollective repository.

This post follows my previous one, dealing with the reuse of chef providers of chef in mcollective. In the comments Adam Jacob had an interesting word and when I wrote my second agent, to manage package I saw it would be a piece of cake to write a really generic agent, due to the nature of chef resource (and the way to invoke them)

So, this is a generic chef resource mcollective agent, with the associated example client code. It anyway deserves an little explanation; it is not mean to work with a command line invocation. Why ? Because I push quite “complex” data as the resourceactions parameter. The only way I found to make this work from command line is to use eval on the argument, which is no way acceptable. Anyway I hope some people will find this useful.

It has been quite calm for a couple of months here. I have switched job, it explains why I had less time to post some things.I now work at fotolia, and I switched from puppet to chef (no troll intended, I still think puppet is a great tool, please read this).

However, a tool I still have is the awesome mcollective. Unfortunately, the most used agents (package, service) relay on puppet providers to do their actions. Fortunately, open source is here, so I wrote a (basic) service agent that uses chef providers to start/stop or restart an agent. It still needs some polish for the status part (ho the ugly hardcoded path) but I was quite excited to share this. Freshly pushed on github !

Thanks to Jordan Sissel for minstrel, an awesome debug tool, the opscode team for the help on the provider and R.I. Pienaar for mcollective (and the support).