Question

What I have: Chef;

What I need: RVM installed for node[:deploy][:user][:name]. I need user-wide install, not system-wide.

What I tried latest:

script 'install_rvm' do
  user = node[:deploy][:user][:name]
  interpreter '/bin/bash'
  code "su -l #{user} -c '\curl https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer | bash -s stable'"
  not_if { ::File.exists? "/home/#{user}/.rvm" }
end

When I manually run su -l <username> -c '\curl <long_url> | bash -s stable' on test server surely it works perfectly.
I expect Chef to run the same code, and in logs it seems like it does, but the next execute resource fails because in fact there is no /home/<username>/.rvm present.
Yes I know that in Chef I can specify user as user node[:deploy][:user][:name] instead of changing user with su but for some reason if I do that rvm would try to install itself in /root/.rvm (env not properly reset?).
Well, I would like to ask, why is Chef so extremely crappy even for such dead-simple tasks, but it looks like I’ve chosen the wrong place, so the question is what am I doing wrong or do I miss something obvious?

Answer 1

Well, at least that worked and may be useful if all better ways to do it with Chef fail for you. Here is the resource for installing ruby

execute 'install_rvm' do
  user('root')
  user = node[:deploy][:user][:name]
  command "su -l #{user} -c '\curl https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer | bash -s stable'"
  not_if { ::File.exists? "/home/#{user}/.rvm" }
end

And the bonus one to create gemset if it is not already present:

execute 'rvm_install_ruby' do
  user('root')
  user = node[:deploy][:user][:name]
  ruby = node[:deploy][:ruby]
  gemset = node[:deploy][:gemset]
  command "su -l #{user} -c 'rvm use #{ruby}@#{gemset} --install --create'"
  not_if do
    if latest_patchlevel = `rvm list`.scan(/(ruby-#{ruby}-p)(\d+)/).map{ |a| a.last.to_i }.sort.last
      `rvm list gemsets`.match /ruby-#{ruby}-p#{latest_patchlevel}@#{gemset}/
    end
  end
end