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  • Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition
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Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

By : Marschall
3.7 (6)
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Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

3.7 (6)
By: Marschall

Overview of this book

This book is for system engineers and administrators who have a fundamental understanding of information management systems and infrastructure. It helps if you've already played around with Chef; however, this book covers all the important topics you will need to know. If you don't want to dig through a whole book before you can get started, this book is for you, as it features a set of independent recipes you can try out immediately.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
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Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Sections
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
1. Chef Infrastructure
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1. Chef Infrastructure
Introduction
Using version control
Installing the Chef development kit on your workstation
Using the hosted Chef platform
Managing virtual machines with Vagrant
Creating and using cookbooks
Inspecting files on your Chef server with knife
Defining cookbook dependencies
Managing cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf
Downloading and integrating cookbooks as vendor branches into your Git repository
Using custom knife plugins
Deleting a node from the Chef server
Developing recipes with local mode
Using roles
Using environments
Freezing cookbooks
Running Chef client as a daemon
Using chef-shell
2
2. Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs
2. Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs
Introduction
Testing your Chef cookbooks
Flagging problems in your Chef cookbooks
Test-driven development for cookbooks using ChefSpec
Integration testing your Chef cookbooks with Test Kitchen
Showing affected nodes before uploading cookbooks
Overriding a node's run list to execute a single recipe
Using why-run mode to find out what a recipe might do
Debugging Chef client runs
Inspecting the results of your last Chef run
Raising and logging exceptions in recipes
Diff-ing cookbooks with knife
Using community exception and report handlers
Creating custom handlers
3
3. Chef Language and Style
3. Chef Language and Style
Introduction
Using community Chef style
Using attributes to dynamically configure recipes
Using templates
Mixing plain Ruby with Chef DSL
Installing Ruby gems and using them in recipes
Using libraries
Using definitions
Creating your own Lightweight Resource Providers (LWRP)
Extending community cookbooks by using application wrapper cookbooks
Creating custom Ohai plugins
Creating custom knife plugins
4
4. Writing Better Cookbooks
4. Writing Better Cookbooks
Introduction
Setting the environment variables
Passing arguments to shell commands
Overriding attributes
Using search to find nodes
Using data bags
Using search to find data bag items
Using encrypted data bag items
Accessing data bag values from external scripts
Getting information about the environment
Writing cross-platform cookbooks
Finding the complete list of operating systems you can use in cookbooks
Making recipes idempotent by using conditional execution
5
5. Working with Files and Packages
5. Working with Files and Packages
Introduction
Creating configuration files using templates
Using pure Ruby in templates for conditionals and iterations
Installing packages from a third-party repository
Installing software from source
Running a command when a file is updated
Distributing directory trees
Cleaning up old files
Distributing different files based on the target platform
6
6. Users and Applications
6. Users and Applications
Introduction
Creating users from data bags
Securing the Secure Shell Daemon (SSHD)
Enabling passwordless sudo
Managing NTP
Managing nginx
Creating nginx virtual hosts
Creating MySQL databases and users
Managing WordPress sites
Managing Ruby on Rails applications
Managing Varnish
Managing your local workstation
7
7. Servers and Cloud Infrastructure
7. Servers and Cloud Infrastructure
Introduction
Creating your infrastructure using Chef Provisioning
Creating cookbooks from a running system with Blueprint
Running the same command on many machines at once
Setting up SNMP for external monitoring services
Deploying a Nagios monitoring server
Building high-availability services using heartbeat
Using HAProxy to load-balance multiple web servers
Using custom bootstrap scripts
Managing firewalls with iptables
Managing fail2ban to ban malicious IP addresses
Managing Amazon EC2 instances
Loading your Chef infrastructure from a file with spiceweasel and knife
8
Index
Index

Inspecting files on your Chef server with knife

Sometimes, you may want to peek into the files stored on your Chef server. You might not be sure about an implementation detail of that specific cookbook version, which is currently installed on your Chef server, and need to look it up. Knife can help you out by letting you show various aspects of the files stored on your Chef server.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have the iptables cookbook installed locally and uploaded on your Chef server.

  1. Install the iptables community cookbook by executing the following command and code lines:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife cookbook site install iptables

    Installing iptables to /Users/mma/work/chef-repo/cookbooks
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...

    Tip

    Take a look at the following error:

    ERROR: IOError: Cannot open or read ../chef-repo/cookbooks/iptables/metadata.rb!

    If you get the preceding error, your cookbook only has a metadata.json file. Make sure that you delete it and create a valid metadata.rb, file instead.

  2. Upload the iptables cookbook on your Chef server by executing the following given command and code lines:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife cookbook upload iptables

    Uploading iptables       [0.14.0]
Uploaded 1 cookbook.

How to do it...

Let's find out how knife can help you to look into a cookbook stored in your Chef server:

  1. First, you want to find out the current version of the cookbook you're interested in. In our case, we're interested in the iptables cookbook:
    mma@laptop:~/work/chef_helpster $ knife cookbook show iptables
iptables   0.14.0
  2. Then, you can look up the definitions of the iptables cookbook, using the version number that you found out in the previous step:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife cookbook show iptables 0.14.0 definitions

      checksum:     45c0b77ff10d7177627694827ce47340
  name:         iptables_rule.rb
  path:         definitions/iptables_rule.rb
  specificity:  default
  url:          https://s3.amazonaws.com/opscode-platform...
  3. Now, you can even show the contents of the iptables_rule.rb definition file, as stored on the server:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife cookbook show iptables 0.14.0 definitions iptables_rule.rb

    #
# Cookbook Name:: iptables
# Definition:: iptables_rule
#
#
define :iptables_rule, :enable => true, :source => nil, :variables => {} do
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
end

How it works...

The knife cookbook show subcommand helps you understand what exactly is stored on the Chef server. It lets you drill down into specific sections of your cookbooks and see the exact content of the files stored in your Chef server.

There's more...

Since Chef 11, you can pass patterns to the knife show command to tell it what exactly you want to see. Showing the contents of the iptables_rule definition can be done as follows, in addition to the way we described previously:

mma@laptop:~/work/chef_helpster $ knife show cookbooks/iptables/definitions/*

cookbooks/iptables/definitions/iptables_rule.rb:
#
# Cookbook Name:: iptables
# Definition:: iptables_rule
#
#
define :iptables_rule, :enable => true, :source => nil, :variables => {} do
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
end

See also

End of Section 8
Next Section
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