[OOTB-distro] OOTB distro build

[Martin Cosgrave]

Hi all

Just wanted to give a quick heads up as to what has been happening with 
the puppet build.

Along with Daren from Digital Catalyst, who is now a member of this 
committee list too, I have been developing the puppet build concept. 
It's been going pretty well.

https://github.com/marsbard/puppet-alfresco

We got the 4.2.f build pretty much working before Christmas. I gave a 
short talk on it at the Granada Alfresco Meetup.

We implemented a simple test suite to help with refactoring to 5.0.x - 
https://github.com/digcat/alfresco-tests - very simple at the moment but 
they will expand to fit or else we can use them as examples for creating 
the tests to go against required addons for example. They're nice 
because they're in python so we don't need a complicated extra compile 
step like you do with java based selenium tests, it tends to get in the 
way of the devops and CI tools.

We are a hair's breadth away from getting a 5.0.c build running but 
getting some errors and also the two of us are getting different 
results. It would be great because of that to get one or two others 
involved in the testing. We are also getting to the point where it's 
knowledge about alfresco that is limiting us (well me anyway), rather 
than knowledge about puppet or travis or jenkins or whatever

To that end it would be great to recruit you guys on the committee that 
aren't involved already to help us with the testing of the 5.0.x branch. 
To do so you'll need to check out the 50x_dev branch of the github project.

Note the instructions in the README.md depending on whether you want to 
run it standalone on a fresh VM or under Vagrant. Come and join 
#orderofthebee IRC channel on Freenode if you want to report your 
results. I'm there most of the time (nickname 'marsbard')

For now this is a standalone build of alfresco with mysql and solr 
integrated into the same server. We are intending CentOS compatibility 
but for now it is compatible with Ubuntu 14.04 (and probably equivalent 
Debian, although that is untested). The intention is to make it possible 
to provision each server role (repo, solr, db) onto separate machines in 
the future. Other things on the roadmap include "bring your own SSL" 
which I consider essential before going to production with this.


Cheers
Martin