This is currently a highly opinionated way of applying Chef recipes against a remote machine. It does the following:

• Installs a Ruby environment and the latest version of Chef

• Copies a set of files to the remote host

• Runs chef-solo with a prefined configuration

It has several limitations:

• It probably only works with Ubuntu 10.04

• It requires passwordless ssh access to the remote machine

• It requires an account with sudo access (if needed will prompt for a password)

• It needs rsync installed locally

• It only works with Chef

Some of these I might fix one day.

My workflow involves frequently starting new virtual machines of different types (Rackspace, VMWare, EC2). These tend to be for general development activities, rather than production servers, and to be short lived. But I still want my shell configiration and common tools installed.

This isn’t designed as a replacement for knife or for running a proper Chef server setup. Please don’t use this because you find the server complicated.

Here’s how to use it:

> vmerize bootstrap host.example.com

> ls
cookbooks roles configs
> ls configs
solo.rb vmerize.json
> vmerize converge host.example.com