Yesterday I carried out the upgrade of a Debian host from Squeeze to Wheezy for a friend. I like doing odd-jobs like this as they're generally painless, and when there are problems it is a fun learning experience.

I accidentally forgot to check on the status of the MySQL server on that particular host, which was a little embarassing, but later put together a reasonably thorough serverspec recipe to describe how the machine should be setup, which will avoid that problem in the future - Introduction/tutorial here.

The more I use serverspec the more I like it. My own personal servers have good rules now:

shelob ~/Repos/git.steve.org.uk/server/testing $ make
..
Finished in 1 minute 6.53 seconds
362 examples, 0 failures

Slow, but comprehensive.

In other news I've now migrated every single one of my personal mercurial repositories over to git. I didn't have a particular reason for doing that, but I've started using git more and more for collaboration with others and using two systems felt like an annoyance.

That means I no longer have to host two different kinds of repositories, and I can use the excellent gitbucket software on my git repository host.

Needless to say I wrote a policy for this host too:

#
#  The host should be wheezy.
#
describe command("lsb_release -d") do
  its(:stdout) { should match /wheezy/ }
end


#
# Our gitbucket instance should be running, under runit.
#
describe supervise('gitbucket') do
  its(:status) { should eq 'run' }
end

#
# nginx will proxy to our back-end
#
describe service('nginx') do
  it { should be_enabled   }
  it { should be_running   }
end
describe port(80) do
  it { should be_listening }
end

#
#  Host should resolve
#
describe host("git.steve.org.uk" ) do
  it { should be_resolvable.by('dns') }
end

Simple stuff, but being able to trigger all these kind of tests, on all my hosts, with one command, is very reassuring.

Tags: git, github, serverspec | 1 comment