Introduction

I am a recovering System Administrator. It's a title I was chained to for the first decade of my career. I've only recently decided to tackle Software Engineering full-time, and despite the challenges of changing careers, it has kept me free of on-call pager duties.

That was until my company decided to start a new cloud-based service offering. This service was to be run 'DevOps' style - a perfect hybrid of my experience in both System Administration and Software Engineering. To scale this new service, we were going to use Chef for infrastructure automation.

At this point, I was becoming well versed in Python. I had little or no interest learning any other language, be it Chef's Ruby DSL, or Ruby itself. However, I knew the pains of repetitive System Administration tasks. So Chef, and Ruby, it would be.

I'm going to have to learn Enough Ruby to be Dangerous.

Ruby

What is Ruby, right?

Ruby is a Python DSL for Hipsters.

j/k.

According to Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby:

An interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming.

Matz created Ruby in the 90's from a desire for a language more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python.

Remember the mantra

At it's heart, Ruby is meant to be quick and easy. It's an important mantra to remember as you learn the language.

Why Ruby for Chef?

According to Adam, the creator of Chef, it comes down to ease-of-use:

  1. Ruby has minimal syntax, so it takes very little code to get most common activities done.
  2. The code should look as close to a configuration as possible. e.g. package 'foo'
  3. Many of Adam's initial customers were Rails shops, so there was little opposition to the adoption of yet-another Ruby app.

What's so different about Ruby?

When Matz describes Ruby as an object-orient language, he really means that everything is an object.

For example, imagine the number '1'. There are various ways to describe the number, for example, as an Integer. There are also a number of things that can be done to the number, such as changing it into a Floating Point Integer.

This is how Ruby sees the world.

The line of Ruby below converts the integer 1 into a floating point integer:

1.to_f
 => 1.0

What about Strings? What can we do to strings? Well, they're objects too:

'taco'.reverse
 => "ocat"

In fact, everything you do something to an object in Ruby, you're really just getting that object back, but changed. You can continue this recursion almost indefinitely:

'taco'.reverse.reverse
 => "taco"

This is a little different than how other languages behave. In Python, for example, it might look something like this:

>>> float(1)
1.0
>>> 'taco'[::-1]
'ocat'

It's about the same amount of code, but unless you're reversing a string every day in Python, are you really going to remember what [::-1] does?

Ruby's reverse seems much more intuitive.

Style

Once I grasped that everything in Ruby was an object, I started flexing my object-oriented programming prowess. I would browse the Ruby Standard Library and chain together ridiculous programs, which, upon later inspection, even I couldn't understand:

# I have no idea what this does:
build = (url_body/'a').collect do |l|
  l.inner_html if l.inner_html.start_with? "#{name}-" 
end.select{|i|!i.nil?}.sort{|x,y|y<=>x}.first

What did I learn?

It's important to write code that other people can read. A great guideline for writing readable code is the community-driven Ruby coding style guide.

If you never go to another Ruby talk or read another Ruby book, do one thing: Read & Use the Style Guide!

Walk the Walk

Aside from helping you write better code as a new developer, the Style Guide has the added benefit of training you in the descriptive lexicon of Ruby. Speaking in the context and the convention of any language is a prerequisite for knowledge. Without integrating these conventions into your discussions of Ruby, you'll be hard-pressed to find a forum guidance and support.

I consider this the classic problem of the verbosity of tech support requests. Akin to the difference between "The website is down." and "I'm getting 'no route to host' when I try to ping the server."

Smoke some irb

If you're ready to start flexing your own Ruby muscle, I recommend starting with irb, Ruby's Interactive Shell. This tool allows a developer to explore the language - experiment with code, test new ideas - all without risking introducing bugs into existing programs (or production systems!):

Below are some examples of running some Ruby code through the irb Interactive Shell. You'll see that irb provides a wide variety of information on the code being executed, the environment it's being executed in, and more:

$ irb
ruby-1.8.7-p352 :001 > puts 'this is irb'
this is irb
 => nil 
ruby-1.8.7-p352 :002 > me = 'gba'
 => "gba" 
ruby-1.8.7-p352 :003 > puts "hi #{me}, welcome to irb."
hi gba, welcome to irb.
 => nil 
ruby-1.8.7-p352 :004 > quit()

irb comes installed with most standard Ruby distributions.

Primitive Primer

Before we dig any deeper, lets have a look at some of Ruby's primitive types. These are the fundamental - atomic - types of knowledge representation in any language.

Below are some of primitive object types you'll be dealing with in Ruby:

# String
'taco'

# Integer
1

# Float
1.0

# Array
['taco', 'burrito']

# Hash
{'lunch' => 'taco', 'price' => 1}

The power of these primitives can be seen in the types of actions we can take on them. We can introspect into this object and see what it's capable of with the method method.

Here's a sample of some of the dozens of built-in things we can do to an object type 'string':

'taco'.methods
 => ["upcase!", "zip", "find_index", "between?", "unpack", ...]

You've already seen an example of this with reverse:

'taco'.reverse
 => 'ocat'

In addition to the methods listed for each of the primitives, Ruby also includes many built-in methods.

methods
=> ["irb_print_working_binding", "inspect", "workspaces", "tap", ...]

There are also many methods inherited from Unix system calls & Kernel:

Kernel.methods
=> ["inspect", "name", "private_class_method", "exit!", "chomp!", ...]

Libraries

Languages gain their power through their extensibility, including their ability to support incorporating external libraries. Ruby too has this power. Using the require statement we can easily import libraries included in both the standard Ruby distribution, and those created by external authors.

Here we're importing the open-uri library, which extends the built-in open method to support.. opening URIs!:

require 'open-uri'
gba = open('http://ampledata.org')

Files & Exceptions

On to the fun stuff. Lets actually do something. Lets start by opening a file. Since we've probably all got access to a Unix system, lets check out what our BOFH has left in our MOTD:

open('/etc/motd', 'r')
 => Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - /etc/motd
  from (irb):1:in `initialize'
  from (irb):1:in `open'
  from (irb):1

Something's gone awry here. We raised an exception, or a program interrupt. There's no shell return-codes here!

There's a lot of information contained in this exception. First, we can see the name of this exception: Errno::ENOENT. Second, we've got a helpful error message in No such file or directory. Finally the path leading back to the code that caused our exception.

I was a sysadmin, I know that files (and filesystems) are never eternal. If our attempt to open a missing MOTD were actually a chunk of code running on a production server, we'd definitely get a page at 3AM. Luckily, we can proactively avoid this by catching this exception using Ruby's begin, rescue and end statements.

Here we're telling Ruby that we want to rescue the specific error Errno::ENOENT, and when it does happen, we actually just want to return a friendlier message:

begin
  open('/etc/motd', 'r')
rescue Errno::ENOENT
  "dude the file isn't there"
end
 => "dude the file isn't there"

Awesome. Our pager is quiet, back to drinking.

But wait, we still don't have a MOTD!

RI & RDoc

Since we're using open to try and read our MOTD, maybe we can also use it to write our MOTD, here too Ruby can help. From the command line we can invoke the ri utility to look at the embedded documentation for open.

Here we're using ri IO.open to understand open's capabilities:

--------------------------------------------------------------- IO::open
     IO.open(fd, mode_string="r" )               => io
     IO.open(fd, mode_string="r" ) {|io| block } => obj
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     With no associated block, +open+ is a synonym for +IO::new+. If the
     optional code block is given, it will be passed _io_ as an
     argument, and the IO object will automatically be closed when the
     block terminates. In this instance, +IO::open+ returns the value of
     the block.

The page above tell us that IO.open is really a synonym of IO.new, so lets use ri IO.new to check out it's capabilities:

---------------------------------------------------------------- IO::new
     IO.new(fd, mode)   => io
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Returns a new +IO+ object (a stream) for the given integer file
     descriptor and mode string. See also +IO#fileno+ and +IO::for_fd+.

        a = IO.new(2,"w")      # '2' is standard error
        $stderr.puts "Hello"
        a.puts "World"

     _produces:_

        Hello
        World

It looks like we can pass the w flag to open to write to files.

Will the real MOTD please stand up?

Where are we going to get the content for our MOTD? Luckily I know an inspirational source:

require 'open-uri'
fd = open('https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=georgetakei')
fd.read
 => "[{\"created_at\":\"Sat May 05 15:27:11 +0000 2012\",\"id\":198795...

I have an idea for a Chef lightweight resource provider!

Of Resources & Men

Real quick lets break down the components of a Chef Lightweight Resource Provider, or LWRP:

  1. Resource: Where we define the actions and parameters of an LWRP.
  2. Provider: The actual implementation & code for an interface.

You can think of a Resource as a method definition, and the Provider as the method itself:

def resource(a, b, c)
  provider
end

First, lets create a new Cookbook: knife cookbook create motd

Now lets create our Resource: vi motd/resources/default.rb

actions :create

def initialize(*args)
  super
  @action = :create
end

Finally, we'll create our Provider: vi motd/providers/default.rb

require 'open-uri'
require 'json'

action :create do
  tw = 'https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name='
  tweet = ''

  # Connect to twitter, ask them for the goods, parse the JSON:
  open(tw + new_resource.name, 'r'){ |t| tweet = JSON(t.read) }

  # Write only the text of the tweet to our file:
  open('/etc/motd', 'w'){ |m| m.write(tweet.first['text']) }

  # Let the other Resources know we did some work today:
  new_resource.updated_by_last_action(true)
end

As an added bonus, we'll include a base recipe: vi motd/recipe/default.rb

motd 'georgetakei'

Cool, lets see if it works with shef:

chef > recipe
chef:recipe > include_recipe 'motd'
chef:recipe > run_chef
[Sun, xxx -0700] DEBUG: Processing motd[georgetakei] on jupiter.splunk.com
[Sun, xxx -0700] INFO: Processing motd[georgetakei] action create (motd::default line 1)
 => true
chef:recipe > open('/etc/motd').read
 => "Ke$ha dubs herself \"Pop's dirty little sister.\" Didn't realize she was from\nthe Ozarks."

Testing

Nothing in possible in programming if it's not tested. Lets refactor our MOTD Provider out to a Library that we can then test it at the unit level: vi motd/libraries/default.rb

require 'open-uri'
require 'json'

tw = 'https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name='

# Connects to twitter, retrieves tweets for screen_name.
def get_tweet(screen_name)
  open(tw + screen_name, 'r'){ |t| JSON(t.read) }
end

# Writes tweet out to /etc/motd.
def write_motd(tweet)
  open('/etc/motd', 'w'){ |m| m.write(tweet) }
end

Now lets create some tests for our Library: vi motd/libraries/default.rb

require 'test/unit'

class TestMOTDLibrary < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def test_get_tweet
    tweets = get_tweets('georgetakei')
    tweet = tweets.first['text']

    assert_kind_of(String, tweet)
    assert_match(/Shields Up!/, tweet)
  end

  def test_write_motd
    tweets = get_tweets('georgetakei')
    tweet = tweets.first['text']

    write_motd(tweet)
    motd = open('/etc/motd').read

    assert_equal(tweet, motd)
  end
end

And lets run our tests ruby libraries/default.rb:

Loaded suite libraries/default
Started
F.
Finished in 0.428887 seconds.

  1) Failure:
test_get_tweet(TestMOTDLibrary) [libraries/default.rb:26]:
<Ke$ha dubs herself \"Pop's dirty little sister.\" Didn't realize she was from\nthe Ozarks.> expected to be =~
</Shields Up!/>.

2 tests, 3 assertions, 1 failures, 0 errors

Oh, right :)

References

Slides