Question

I’m using Chef with Vagrant and would like to build a rails stack with RVM.

Here’s a snippet of my Vagrantfile configuration so far:

...
config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|
  chef.cookbooks_path = "cookbooks"

  chef.add_recipe "apt"
  chef.add_recipe "build-essential"
  chef.add_recipe "ntp"
  chef.add_recipe "openssl"
  chef.add_recipe "apache2"
  chef.add_recipe "mysql"
  chef.add_recipe "mysql::server"
  chef.add_recipe "redis"
  chef.add_recipe "git"
  chef.add_recipe "rvm::system"
  chef.add_recipe "rvm::gem_package"
  chef.add_recipe "passenger_apache2"

  chef.json = { 
    :mysql => { 
      :server_root_password => 'root',
      :bind_address => '127.0.0.1'
    },
    :redis => {
      :daemonize => 'yes',
      :port => '6379'
    },
    :rvm => {
      :rubies => 'ruby-1.9.3-p194',
      :global_gems => [
        {:name => 'bundler'},
        {:name => 'rake'},
        {:name => 'passenger',
         :version => '3.0.17'
        }
      ]
    },
    :passenger => {
      :version => '3.0.17'
    }
  }
end

Firing up vagrant, the provisioning works until it tries to install passenger, then I get this error:

...
ERROR: gem_package[passenger] (passenger_apache2::default line 48) has had an error
ERROR: gem_package[passenger] (/tmp/vagrant-chef-1/chef-solo-1/cookbooks/passenger_apache2/recipes/default.rb:48:in `from_file') had an error:
gem_package[passenger] (passenger_apache2::default line 48) had an error: NoMethodError: undefined method `join' for nil:NilClass
...

sshing into vagrant, I can see that RVM and the gems installed fine:

vagrant@lucid32:~$ rvm list

rvm rubies

=* ruby-1.9.3-p194 [ i686 ]

# => - current
# =* - current && default
#  * - default

vagrant@lucid32:~$ gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

bundler (1.2.1)
daemon_controller (1.0.0)
fastthread (1.0.7)
passenger (3.0.17)
rack (1.4.1)
rake (0.9.2.2)
rubygems-bundler (1.1.0)
rvm (1.11.3.5)

And manually running rvmsudo passenger-install-apache2-module works fine

So I’m pretty sure the problem is chef running its commands without rvm loaded

here are the commands for cookbooks/passenger_apache2/recipes/default.rb: line 48-55

...
gem_package "passenger" do
  version node[:passenger][:version]
end

execute "passenger_module" do
  command 'passenger-install-apache2-module --auto'
  creates node[:passenger][:module_path]
end

The cookbooks I’m using for RVM and passaenger_apache, are:

• https://github.com/fnichol/chef-rvm
• https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/passenger_apache2

I tried replacing passenger-install-apache2-module --auto with rvmsudo passenger-install-apache2-module --auto with no luck…

Does anybody know how to get rvm and rvmsudo working in chef?

Answer 1

I believe you are correct in thinking that Chef is executing commands without rvm loaded. Perhaps you can use the rvm_shell command from chef-rvm to install passenger. Something like this might work:

rvm_shell "passenger_module" do
  ruby_string "ruby-1.9.3-p194"
  code        "passenger-install-apache2-module --auto"
  creates node[:passenger][:module_path]
end