Grok code with Puppet

As the Lookout code-base grows, both in individual repositories but also in the sheer number of repos we maintain, I’ve found it often difficult to find what I’m looking for.

Some of that difficulty is due to ActiveRecord’s determination to implement the world through meta-programming, but for everything else I’m turning to OpenGrok.

OpenGrok itself is a Java-based code cross reference and search engine, which works surprisingly well with Ruby. While not perfect, it certainly blew LXR away in both ease-of-use but also cross-referencing of Ruby, Java, and C code.

Below is an example of searching for the AWS class in my Blimpy project.

You’ll notice in the search results that there is a green-colored annotation to the right of the code snippet denoting the actual definitions compared to other search results.

When I click on aws.rb and dive into the code itself, I can navigate based on method definitions, but also pull in git-annotate(1) style annotations (not pictured).

Since I’m no longer in the business of hand-crafting machines, I went ahead and created puppet-opengrok. This OpenGrok Puppet module, while lacking in rspec-puppet tests (see @glarizza, I’m a hypocrite), will allow you to stand up a simple OpenGrok instance on an Ubuntu Server of your choosing.

Take the following manifest for example:

node default {
  include opengrok

  opengrok::repo {
    "puppet" :
      git_url => 'git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet.git';
  }
}

The module will handle installing the packages tomcat6, git-core and a few others to make things possible, but after you’ve run Puppet you can navigate to: http://yourhostname.lan:8080/source and you’ll find OpenGrok has indexed the Puppet code base for you!

The module will also install a cronjob which updates the source trees and indexes every 10 minutes.

Currently puppet-opengrok is quite rough around the edges, since I used TDD (Tinker Driven Development) to build it intead of TDD (Test Driven Development). It will most certainly work on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, but anywhere else your mileage may vary :)

If you’re familliar with Puppet Forge, you can install the rtyler-opengrok module with the puppet-module tool.