We installed Chef Solo in part 1, we wrote some recipes in part 2, and now we’ll be tying everything together in part 3. When we’re done, we’ll not only have a fully provisioned server running your Rails app, but we’ll also have an automated way of repeating this process whenever such a need arises in the future.

In part 1, we learned about Chef Solo and used it to create a standard Chef directory structure, along with our own cookbook. Now it’s time to start writing the recipes we will run to provision our Rails server and install Node.js, PostgreSQL, rbenv, Ruby, Redis, and Nginx.

About a month ago, I was in the middle of upgrading the server running Phindee using the harmless (or so I thought) apt-get upgrade. All appeared to be going well. But when I visited the app in the browser, staring back at me was the infamous “We’re sorry, but something went wrong” page. I hit the logs, and luckily, it turned out to be a minor problem that was fixable without too much downtime.

Phindee users recently got the ability to “like” happy hours. Up until that point, all my happy hour data was safely stored in a version controlled seed.rb file, but now I was dealing with data that was dynamically generated and not being backed up anywhere. And that is not a good thing.

A few days ago, I added search functionality to Phindee so users can quickly find information about a particular happy hour. Search that is well-done often comes with autocomplete, and Phindee is no exception.