Checkout the Alfresco SPK presentation at Alfresco Day.

What is Alfresco SPK

Alfresco SPK is a toolset that can be used by stack operators (Devops/Architects/Engineers, Support, QA, Sales, Marketing, ...) to define Alfresco immutable Images, testing them locally first, also for arbitrarily complex architectures.

It allows you to:

1. Run an arbitrarily complex stack locally
2. Build (immutable) image(s) with the exact same provisioning logic used for local run
3. Test immutable images locally
4. Run a stack on any orchestration tool with the same provisioning logic used for local runs

Installation

Alfresco SPK uses (Vagrant and) vagrant-packer-plugin to build images and chef-alfresco to install Alfresco inside the boxes.

Please install:

• Vagrant
• Virtualbox
• Packer

To install the Vagrant Packer Plugin:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-packer-plugin

Run a stack locally

git clone https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-spk.git
cd alfresco-spk/stacks/community-allinone
vagrant up

Browse stacks folder and change VAGRANT_VAGRANTFILE to test the stack of your choice; to customize it, read more about Stack definitions below.

Build an Image

git clone https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-spk.git
cd alfresco-spk/stacks/community-allinone
vagrant packer-build

This will build an Amazon AMI, but could also create an OVF, Vagrant .box or any other nature supported by Packer

Concepts

What is an Instance template

An Instance Template is a JSON file that includes all information to build an immutable image; it contains:

1. chef-alfresco configuration, using Chef attributes syntax; it also includes the list of recipes to invoke (run_list)
2. vagrant-packer configuration, using Packer syntax

Alfresco SPK provides a list of pre-defined instance-templates that are used by the sample stacks.

Stack definitions

In every stack example you will find the following items:

# Where the instance template is located
instance_template_path = "../instance-templates/community-allinone.json"

# chef-alfresco binary
cookbooks_url = "https://artifacts.alfresco.com/nexus/service/local/repositories/releases/content/org/alfresco/devops/chef-alfresco/0.6.20/chef-alfresco-0.6.20.tar.gz"

# chef-alfresco recipes to invoke
run_list = ["alfresco::default"]

Single-instance stacks - such as Alfresco Community Allinone - are simpler to start with; if you're looking for multi-machine configurations, check Alfresco Enterprise Clustered

Alfresco Enterprise

export MVN_CHEF_REPO_USERNAME=<your_nexus_user>
export MVN_CHEF_REPO_PASSWORD=<your_nexus_password>

cd stacks/enterprise-clustered
vagrant up

Integrating with Orchestration tools (WIP)

When AMIs are (or not) in place and provisioning logic have been tested locally, it is possible to configure other orchestration tools and/or Cloud providers in order to spin up the same stack remotely.

Alfresco SPK provides a chef-bootstrap.sh that can be used to easily integrate with the orchestration tool of your choice; below we provide an integration example using AWS Cloudformation (and UserData attribute)

CHEF_NODE_NAME=allinone
CHEF_INSTANCE_TEMPLATE=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alfresco/alfresco-spk/master/instance-templates/community-allinone.json

CHEF_LOCAL_YAML_VARS_URL=file://$WORK_DIR/local-vars.yaml
cat > $CHEF_LOCAL_YAML_VARS_URL << "EOF"
---
alfresco:
  public_hostname: '{"Fn::GetAtt": ["ElasticLoadBalancer","DNSName"]}'
EOF

ruby chef-bootstrap.rb

The expression {"Fn::GetAtt": ["ElasticLoadBalancer","DNSName"]} is Cloudformation-specific and reads the DNSName value of an ElasticLoadBalancer instance defined in the same Cloudformation template.