Use Syntax Highlighters
Highlighting syntax is a big time server. Color highlighting lets you save time and trouble by catching errors early in the development process.
Use a syntax plug-in for your editor!
Revision control system hooks. Code review.
You can set up a precommit hook to validate syntax before accepting code into your VCS repository; or you can use Jenkins to syntax-check new commits and move them to another branch if they validate.
knife-spork from Etsy is a workflow plugin from Etsy to allow multiple users to work on the same Chef repo/server without stepping on each other’s toes. Spork integrates with graphite and IRC. Good for big teams!
https://github.com/jonlives/knife-spork
Gerrit is a Web-based code review system based on git.
https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/
Use Vagrant to test your code.
- Vagrant has provisioners for Ansible, Chef, CFEngine, Puppet and Shell.
- You do have block out or disable external dependencies (since Vagrant is encapsulated).
- SSDs pay for themselves. VMs come up much faster.
- Matt Barr keeps a local copy of CentOS DVD mounted to provide the full repo to his Vagrant VMs. He also deploys new code to VMs automatically.
- Sinatra is a web development framework for minimalists. You can use it to quickly build simulators of external web services inside your Vagrant environment.
- Jenkins can deploy your code into Vagrant VMs
Testing
foodcritic, puppetlint and cf-promises check syntax. But how do you check the output (the modified system)? The answers are unit testing, integration testing and user acceptance testing.
Use Jenkins, TravisCI, etc.
rspec is a Ruby testing framework. You can write tests for your configuration in it.
For Chef, chefspec is an extension to rspec for unit-testing. Also, minitests and test-kitchen (http://www.opscode.com/blog/2012/08/17/announcing-test-kitchen/ and https://github.com/opscode/test-kitchen)
For Puppet: serverspec + rspec do functional checks of remote systems.
User acceptance testing
You can deploys to test VMs first (like Matt does).
You can deploy to “canary” servers (a limited production deploy, AKA “toe-in-the-water” deploy).
External monitoring can be done with traditional tools, such as Nagios.
cucumber-nagios lets you describe how a system should work in natural language, and outputs whether it does in the Nagios plugin format
http://www.cucumber-nagios.org/
http://fooforge.com/2012/11/06/Analyzing-my-OSMC-2012-talk-on-BDI.html
Vertical Sysadmin, Inc. 