HereI've been using Chef for awhile at work, and seeing how complicated parts of it can be, I wanted to take the time to write a blog post about it, and give an introduction on how to be up and running with Chef. Hopefully it will save others some the aggravation I dealt with early on. Also, I tested these recipes out on an Ubuntu 12.04 box. (If you aren't running Ubuntu, no problem! Just install Vagrant)
Different Parts of Chef
There are a few different parts of chef:
- Chef-server - The software that runs on a server and holds "cookbooks", "recipes", and "data bags". We won't be covering that here.
- Chef-client - The software that runs on machines managed by Chef. It talks to the machine running Chef-server, downloads cookbooks from it, and runs the recipes in those cookbooks locally. We won't be covering that here, either.
- Knife - A tool used to manage machines with chef-client on remotely. We definitely won't be covering that here.
- Chef-solo - A tool used to run recipes out of cookbooks in the absence of a server. That will be the focus of this article.
Chef Configuration
If we try and run chef-solo right away, it will freak out because it doesn't have a configuration. So the very first thing we need to is create a configuration file, which we'll call config.rb:
base_dir Dir.pwd + "/" file_cache_path base_dir + "cache/" cookbook_path base_dir + "cookbooks/"