Chef is a tool for the automated deployment of servers, workstations and services. The idea is pretty neat in that once you’ve built your scripts you can tell Chef “I want a new Redhat server running apache, it needs to have Ruby etc. and my web app installed” and Chef will go away and figure everything out and do it.<\/p>\n
I’m just learning to use Chef and I wanted to put together a simple example. Getting Chef installed on Ubuntu 10.04 was harder than I expected! The install process here has a LOT of redundant steps. At some point I’ll try this again on a clean server and correct this.<\/p>\n
So here’s the process to run an example simple Chef “recipe”. It uses chef-solo, which is a serverless version of Chef.<\/p>\n
1. Install Chef. On Ubuntu I did the following. I had some issues during install, and some of the following packages may not be required, but this is exactly what I did:<\/p>\n
\r\nsudo apt-get install chef ruby-dev build-essential ruby-gems1.9.1 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev ruby1.9.1-dev\r\nsudo apt-get install libopenssl-ruby1.9.1\r\nsudo apt-get install ruby-gems\r\nsudo apt-get install libmixlib-log-ruby\r\nsudo gem install net-shh net-ssh-multi fog highline # THIS PROBABLY ISN'T REQUIRED\r\nsudo gem install chef # THIS PROBABLY ISN'T REQUIRED\r\nsudo gem install knife-ec2\r\nsudo gem install mixlib-authentication\r\nsudo apt-get install libhighline-ruby1.9.1\r\nsudo apt-get install ruby-full\r\nsudo gem install json\r\nsudo gem install highline\r\n<\/pre>\n2. Create a chef-solo config file and place it in ~\/solo.rb (note, you must use the full path to your home directory here):<\/p>\n
\r\nfile_cache_path "\/home\/YOURUSERNAME\/chef-solo"\r\ncookbook_path "\/home\/YOURUSERNAME\/chef-solo\/cookbooks"\r\n<\/pre>\nThis just tells Chef where to store cached files and where your “cookbook” lives.<\/p>\n
You need to create these directories for Chef:<\/p>\n
\r\nmkdir chef-solo\r\nmkdir chef-solo\/cookbooks\r\n<\/pre>\n3. Use knife to create a new “cookbook” a “cookbook” is where your “recipes” (install scripts) go. For some reason, knife isn’t anywhere on the path…<\/p>\n
\r\n\/var\/lib\/gems\/1.9.1\/gems\/chef-0.10.4\/bin\/knife cookbook create MYCOOKBOOK -c ~\/solo.rb\r\n<\/pre>\n4. Create you recipe file, create a new file called:<\/p>\n
\r\n~\/chef-solo\/cookbooks\/MYCOOKBOOK\/recipes\/myrecipe.rb\r\n<\/pre>\nWith the following contents, edit YOURUSERNAME and YOURUSERGROUP accordingly:<\/p>\n
\r\nif platform?("redhat", "centos", "fedora")\r\n # code for only redhat based systems.\r\n file "\/tmp\/rpm_based" do\r\n owner "YOURUSERNAME"\r\n group "YOURUSERGROUP"\r\n mode "0755"\r\n action :create\r\n end\r\nend\r\n\r\nif platform?("ubuntu", "debian")\r\n # code for debian based systems\r\n file "\/tmp\/deb_based" do\r\n owner "YOURUSERNAME"\r\n group "YOURUSERGROUP"\r\n mode "0755"\r\n action :create\r\n end\r\nend\r\n<\/pre>\n5. Create a JSON run specification. Create a new file called ~\/this.json with the following contents:<\/p>\n
\r\n{\r\n "run_list": [\r\n "recipe[MYCOOKBOOK::myrecipe]"\r\n ]\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n6. Run the recipe!<\/p>\n
\r\nchef-solo -c ~\/solo.rb MYCOOKBOOK -j .\/this.json\r\n<\/pre>\nThis very simple example recipe just checks if the server is running a debian based distribution or a redhat one and writes a file to \/tmp accordingly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chef is a tool for the automated deployment of servers, workstations and services. The idea is pretty neat in that once you’ve built your scripts you can tell Chef “I want a new Redhat server running apache, it needs to have Ruby etc. and my web app installed” and Chef will go away and figure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1RRoU-6k","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":399,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions\/399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}