Chef: Strange Erlang Error when Trying to Run Chef-Solo

Question

Trying to install Chef on my Oracle Linux Box. Got all the way through the below instructions and I get to the following spot:

Run chef-solo:

(in url): http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Bootstrap+Chef+RubyGems+Installation

...and I get the following error:

[root@chefmaster ~]# chef-solo -c /etc/chef/solo.rb -j ~/chef.json -r  http://s3.amazonaws.com/chef-solo/bootstrap-latest.tar.gz
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:01 -0700] INFO: *** Chef 0.10.0 ***
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:02 -0700] INFO: Setting the run_list to ["recipe[chef- server::rubygems-install]"] from JSON
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:02 -0700] INFO: Run List is [recipe[chef-server::rubygems-install]]
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:02 -0700] INFO: Run List expands to [chef-server::rubygems-install]
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:02 -0700] INFO: Starting Chef Run for localhost
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:03 -0700] INFO: Processing user[chef] action create (chef-server::rubygems-install line 30)
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:03 -0700] INFO: Processing package[erlang] action install (erlang::default line 26)
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:04 -0700] ERROR: package[erlang] (erlang::default line 26) has had an error
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:04 -0700] ERROR: Running exception handlers
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:04 -0700] ERROR: Exception handlers complete
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:04 -0700] FATAL: Stacktrace dumped to /tmp/chef-solo/chef-stacktrace.out
[Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:53:04 -0700] FATAL: Chef::Exceptions::Package: package[erlang] (erlang::default line 26) had an error: No version specified, and no candidate version available for erlang

I checked Google and they refer to an outdated link for Chef via RPM which is a couple of years old. I have erlang installed:

[root@chef ~]# erl --version Erlang R14B03 (erts-5.8.4) [source] [64-bit] [rq:1] [async-threads:0] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]

Any ideas would be welcome

Answer 1

I had this problem as well. The problem is that the default yum repositories that come with centos (which I am assuming you are on) don't include couch. You have to add the epel yum repository like so:

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

After doing that, everything should work smoothly.

Answer 2

The above didn't work for me on CentOS 5.x off the bat.

In /etc/yum.conf, I had to change...

reposdir=/etc/false

... to ...

reposdir=/etc/yum.repos.d/