Integrating GitHub Version Control with Chef System Management

Overview

Identity and Access Management has access to three contexts in University of Alaska GitHub? Repository:

• Personal (identified by UA Username)
• OIT - IAM
• OIT - Security

Within the OIT - IAM repository, there are two types of repositories, those that represent a Chef managed system and those that contain Source files.

Choosing a Context

Once logged in by default, the context will be set to a user's personal repository. A drop down button allows the user to select the desired context for IAM activities.

Identifying Chef Cookbooks versus Source Files

A convention has been established for identifying which repositories contain Chef cookbooks, i.e., the configuration for an entire system, or source files to run an application. By convention, anything that is a cookbook follows the naming format of OIT-IAM/iam-<application name>-app.

For example, the image below shows that the first three listed repositories are Chef cookbooks for the People, Shibboleth v3, and Xpress Connect (XPC) applications. The fourth listing contains source files for the the application, people.alaksa.edu.

Contents of Chef Cookbook Repository

Below is an example of a Chef Cookbook repository. Notice a few of the keywords used to indicate standard Chef directories and files such as, recipes, kitchen.yml, metadata.rb

Contents of a Source File Repository

The source files for people, as opposed to the Chef Cookbook, contain no set pattern, other than what is needed for the application itself.

Pulling a Repository to a Local Desktop