4. README

README


  • Link: https://docs.chef.io/chef_overview.html

    Chef is a automation tool for systems and cloud infrastructure. It make is easy to deploy servers and applications to virtual, physical or cloud environments. The chef-client is used to maintain servers and cookbooks & recipes are used to tell the chef-client running on each node, how it should be configured. The chef-client is installed on every node.

    Components Of Chef

    Workstation
    This is where cookbooks & recipes are kept, these should be version control. Some cookbooks are from Chef Supermarket, a place where pre-build cookbooks from the community and Chef. Cookbooks are written in the Ruby programming language.

    Nodes
    All the servers you maintain via chef are called nodes, these nodes have the chef software called chef-client installed on them. The chef-client performs the config/ run the run-list and communicates with the chef server for configuration information about the node.

    Chef Server
    The chef server hold all the info about the nodes, this info is upload via the workstation(s) or directly entered via the Web UI. It chef server is essentially for managing Chef

    You can install all these components on a standalone server for testing, PoC, and similar uses.

    The chef development kit (Chef DK) is install on the workstation and contains all the tools needed to start using chef.

    Two important commands are:
    chef to work with chef-repo where all the cookbooks are.
    knife to work with the nodes and chef server

    The chef-repo is a directory structure customised to your needs, it contains cookbooks, cookbooks contain recipes, attributes, custom resources, libraries, definitions, files, templates, tests, and metadata. This area should be version controlled.

    ohai is a data collecting tool, it passes data to the chef-client. It is installed as part of the chef-client install

    Chef is based on Ruby.

    Notes:

    The knife command expects you to have configured knife settings using knife configure which generates a knife.rb, it expects files like security pem files to be in place and in the right location. see the man page for knife configure http://bit.ly/2oKsxdm

chef 52
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