Configuration management doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s the single most important thing we do as sysadmins at 37signals. It’s about documenting an entire infrastructure setup in a single code base, rather than a set of disparate files, scripts and commands. This has been our biggest sysadmin pain point.

Recently we hit a milestone of easing this pain across our infrastructure by adopting Chef, the latest in a long line of configuration management tools.

We struggled with a few other tools before settling on Chef. We love it. It’s open source, easy to hack on, opinionated, written in Ruby and has a great community behind it. It’s really changed the way we work. I think of it as a Rails for Sysadmins.

Here’s a snippet of all the data required to make Chef configure a bare Ubuntu Linux install as a Basecamp application server.


:basecamp => {
  :gems => ['fast_xs', ['hpricot', '0.8.1'], 'aws-s3', 'ruby-prof',
            ['net-ssh', '1.1.4'], ['net-sftp', '1.1.1'], ['tzinfo', '0.3.9']],
  :packages => ['imagemagick', 'elinks', 'zip'],
  :apache_modules => ["auth_token", "xsendfile", "rewrite"],
  :passenger => { :tune_gc => true }
}

As an early adopter, we’ve helped Chef grow and opened our repository of Chef recipes. If you’re interested in using Chef, take a look there for some example uses. Please fork and provide feedback on Github.