Browse Library
Sign In Start Free Trial
Close icon Search icon
Account
Browse Library Advanced Search Sign In Start Free Trial

Add to playlist

Create a Playlist

Modal Close icon
You need to login to use this feature.
  • Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition
  • Toc
  • feedback
Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

By : Marschall
3.7 (6)
close
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)
close
close
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
chevron up
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

Using custom knife plugins

Knife comes with a set of commands out of the box. The built-in commands deal with the basic elements of Chef-like cookbooks, roles, data bags, and so on. However, it would be nice to use knife for more than just the basic stuff. Fortunately, knife comes with a plugin API and there are already a host of useful knife plugins built by the makers of Chef and the Chef community.

Getting ready

Make sure you have an account at Amazon Web Services (AWS) if you want to follow along and try out the knife-ec2 plugin. There are knife plugins available for most Cloud providers. Go through the There's more... section of this recipe for the list.

How to do it...

Let's see which knife plugins are available, and try to use one to manage Amazon EC2 instances:

  1. List the knife plugins that are shipped as Ruby gems using the chef command-line tool:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ chef gem search -r knife-

    *** REMOTE GEMS ***
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...

knife-azure (1.3.0)
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
knife-ec2 (0.10.0)
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
  2. Install the EC2 plugin to manage servers in the Amazon AWS Cloud:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ chef gem install knife-ec2

    Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
Fetching: knife-ec2-0.10.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed knife-ec2-0.10.0
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...

6 gems installed
  3. List all the available instance types in AWS using the knife ec2 plugin. Please use your own AWS credentials instead of XXX and YYYYY:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife ec2 flavor list --aws-access-key-id XXX --aws-secret-access-key YYYYY

    ID           Name                                 Arch    RAM     Disk     Cores      
c1.medium    High-CPU Medium                          32-bit  1740.8  350 GB   5          
…TRUNCATED OUTPUT…
m2.xlarge    High-Memory Extra Large                  64-bit  17510.  420 GB   6.5        
t1.micro     Micro Instance                           0-bit   613     0 GB     2

How it works...

Knife looks for plugins at various places.

First, it looks into the .chef directory, which is located inside your current Chef repository, to find the plugins specific to this repository:

./.chef/plugins/knife/

Then, it looks into the .chef directory, which is located in your home directory, to find the plugins that you want to use in all your Chef repositories:

~/.chef/plugins/knife/

Finally, it looks for installed gems. Knife will load all the code from any chef/knife/ directory found in your installed Ruby gems. This is the most common way of using plugins developed by Chef or the Chef community.

There's more...

There are hundreds of knife plugins, including plugins for most of the major Cloud providers, as well as the major virtualization technologies, such as VMware, vSphere, and Openstack, amongst others.

See also

  • To learn how to write your own knife plugins, see the Creating custom knife plugins recipe in Chapter 2, Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs
  • Find a list of supported Cloud providers at http://docs.chef.io/plugin_knife.html
End of Section 12
Next Section
bookmark search playlist font-size

Change the font size

margin-width

Change margin width

day-mode

Change background colour

Close icon Search
Country selected
Close icon Your notes and bookmarks

Delete Bookmark

Modal Close icon
Are you sure you want to delete it?
Cancel
Yes, Delete