Gem Distribution

Choria requires certain ruby gems to be installed for Puppet’s ruby and will install these via the internet by default. However, many sites have policies prohibiting their nodes from accessing dependencies via the internet. Choria allows you to manage its own dependencies and disable the built in Gem management:

First, configure Choria to not install any gem dependencies via Hiera:

mcollective_choria::manage_gem_dependencies: false

You can then configure Choria to install the gems for you via the system packager (see below for how to package gems up). Let’s say you called the package puppet-gem-choria-mcorpc-support, you can configure installation again via Hiera:

mcollective_choria::package_dependencies:
  "puppet-gem-choria-mcorpc-support": "2.20.7"

It will now install this package for you and allow you to manage the version of it. The ordering is handled correctly and MCollective will restart appropriately.

How to package gems with fpm

You can package gems into a package for your system package manager using using fpm. To ensure you package not only the gem itself but all of its dependencies, follow the section on packaging gem dependencies.

Example: packaging choria-mcorpc-support into an rpm

This example shows how to package the choria-mcorpc-support gem and its dependencies into RPM packages. fpm will automatically make the choria-mcorpc-support RPM depend on the other RPM packages. Note that this example requires an enterprise linux host with the necessary RPM tools installed.

1. Prepare a staging directory

   mkdir /tmp/gems
   

2. Download the gem and its dependencies

   gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc --install-dir /tmp/gems choria-mcorpc-support
   

3. Package each gem into an RPM called “puppet-gem…”. Note that this assumes that Puppet’s gem binary is at /opt/puppetlabs/puppet/bin/gem

   find /tmp/gems/cache -name '*.gem' | xargs -rn1 -I {} fpm \
   --description "Packaged puppet Gem: {}" \
   --gem-gem "/opt/puppetlabs/puppet/bin/gem" \
   --no-gem-env-shebang \
   --gem-package-name-prefix "puppet-gem" \
   -s gem \
   -t rpm {}
   

4. Copy the RPMs to your RPM repository (in this example: /mnt/repo/choria)

   mv *.rpm /mnt/repo/choria`
   

5. Refresh the repo metadata

   createrepo /mnt/repo/choria`