Capistrano vs Chef

Overview

Chef

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.1K

Votes345

Capistrano

Stacks1.5K

Followers647

Votes232

GitHub Stars12.9K

Forks1.8K

Capistrano vs Chef: What are the differences?

<Given Introduction text here>

Version Control Integration: Capistrano is more focused on deploying applications from version control repositories like Git, whereas Chef is mainly used for configuring and managing servers, which includes setting up applications.
Language: Capistrano is primarily built using Ruby, making it easier for Ruby developers to understand and work with, while Chef uses its own domain-specific language (DSL) for defining infrastructure configurations.
Scope: Capistrano is more suited for application deployment and release management, whereas Chef is better for infrastructure automation, configuration management, and continuous deployment.
Ease of Use: Capistrano provides a simpler and more straightforward deployment process, suitable for smaller applications, while Chef offers more flexibility and complexity for larger and more intricate infrastructure setups.
Community Support: Capistrano has a smaller community compared to Chef, which has a larger and more active user base. This can affect the availability of resources, plugins, and community support for troubleshooting and assistance.
Host Management: Capistrano focuses more on deploying to specific hosts or sets of hosts, while Chef emphasizes managing the state of all systems in your infrastructure.

In Summary, Capistrano is more for application deployment from version control, while Chef is more for infrastructure automation and configuration management.

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Advice on Chef, Capistrano

Rogério

Software Developer

Aug 10, 2021

Needs adviceon

Docker

Git

Linux

Personal Dotfiles management

Given that they are all “configuration management” tools - meaning they are designed to deploy, configure and manage servers - what would be the simplest - and yet robust - solution to manage personal dotfiles - for n00bs.

Ideally, I reckon, it should:

be containerized (@{Docker}|tool:586|?)
be versionable (@{Git}|tool:1046|)
ensure idempotency
allow full automation (tests, CI/CD, etc.)
be fully recoverable (@{Linux}|tool:10483|/ @{macOS}|tool:5560|)
be easier to setup/manage (as much as possible)

Does it make sense?

282k views282k

Comments

Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

329k views329k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Chef	Capistrano
Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.	Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.
Access to 800+ Reusable Cookbooks;Integration with Leading Cloud Providers;Enterprise Platform Support including Windows and Solaris;Create, Bootstrap and Manage OpenStack Clouds;Easy Installation with 'one-click' Omnibus Installer;Automatic System Discovery with Ohai;Text-Based Search Capabilities;Multiple Environment Support;"Knife" Command Line Interface;"Dry Run" Mode for Testing Potential Changes;Manage 10,000+ Nodes on a Single Chef Server;Available as a Hosted Service;Centralized Activity and Resource Reporting;"Push" Command and Control Client Runs;Multi-Tenancy;Role-Based Access Control [RBAC];High Availability Installation Support and Verification;Centralized Authentication Using LDAP or Active Directory	Reliably deploy web application to any number of machines simultaneously, in sequence or as a rolling set;Automate audits of any number of machines (checking login logs, enumerating uptimes, and/or applying security patches);Script arbitrary workflows over SSH;Automate common tasks in software teams;Drive infrastructure provisioning tools such as chef-solo, Ansible or similar
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 12.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.8K
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 1.5K
Followers 1.1K	Followers 647
Votes 345	Votes 232
Pros & Cons
Pros 110 Dynamic and idempotent server configuration 76 Reusable components 47 Integration testing with Vagrant 43 Repeatable 30 Mock testing with Chefspec	Pros 121 Automated deployment with several custom recipes 63 Simple 23 Ruby 11 Release-folders with symlinks 9 Multistage deployment
Integrations
Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure HP Cloud Compute Joyent Cloud	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Chef, Capistrano?

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

Puppet Bolt

It is an open source orchestration tool that automates the manual work it takes to maintain your infrastructure. Use it to automate tasks that you perform on an as-needed basis or as part of a greater orchestration workflow.

Related Comparisons

Capistrano vs Chef: What are the differences?

<Given Introduction text here>

Version Control Integration: Capistrano is more focused on deploying applications from version control repositories like Git, whereas Chef is mainly used for configuring and managing servers, which includes setting up applications.
Language: Capistrano is primarily built using Ruby, making it easier for Ruby developers to understand and work with, while Chef uses its own domain-specific language (DSL) for defining infrastructure configurations.
Scope: Capistrano is more suited for application deployment and release management, whereas Chef is better for infrastructure automation, configuration management, and continuous deployment.
Ease of Use: Capistrano provides a simpler and more straightforward deployment process, suitable for smaller applications, while Chef offers more flexibility and complexity for larger and more intricate infrastructure setups.
Community Support: Capistrano has a smaller community compared to Chef, which has a larger and more active user base. This can affect the availability of resources, plugins, and community support for troubleshooting and assistance.
Host Management: Capistrano focuses more on deploying to specific hosts or sets of hosts, while Chef emphasizes managing the state of all systems in your infrastructure.

In Summary, Capistrano is more for application deployment from version control, while Chef is more for infrastructure automation and configuration management.

Capistrano vs Chef

Overview