Getting started with this Chef repo

If you already have Ruby installed (OS X does) just run gem install chef to get our latest release. You can use Hosted Chef as the server side since you don't need more than the 5 free nodes. After signing up with Hosted Chef you will need to download both your own key and the organization validator key, and download a knife.rb config file. Install all of these to ~/.chef folder. Upload the cookbooks with knife cookbook upload -a and the roles with for f in roles/*.rb; do knife role from file `basename $f`; done.

Configuring cloud credentials

The Chef wiki shows a general overview but to get EC2 working quickly just gem install knife-ec2 and add the following to your knife.rb:

knife[:aws_access_key_id]  = '<your key id>'
knife[:aws_secret_access_key] = '<your access key>'
knife[:aws_ssh_key_id] = '<your ssh key name>'
knife[:flavor] = 'm1.small'
knife[:image] = 'ami-7000f019'

Launching servers

To start a single server running all components:

knife ec2 server create -x ubuntu -r 'role[base],role[pkg]' -d ubuntu10.04-apt

or to start 5 machines running all the parts:

knife ec2 server create -x ubuntu -r 'role[base],role[packaginator_database_master]' -d ubuntu10.04-apt
knife ec2 server create -x ubuntu -r 'role[base],role[packaginator_task_broker]' -d ubuntu10.04-apt
knife ec2 server create -x ubuntu -r 'role[base],role[packaginator_application_server]' -d ubuntu10.04-apt
knife ec2 server create -x ubuntu -r 'role[base],role[packaginator_application_server]' -d ubuntu10.04-apt 
knife ec2 server create -x ubuntu -r 'role[base],role[packaginator_load_balancer]' -d ubuntu10.04-apt