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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

Developing recipes with local mode

If running your own Chef server seems like an overkill and you're not comfortable with using the hosted Chef, you can use local mode to execute cookbooks.

Getting ready

  1. Create a cookbook named my_cookbook by running the following command:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ chef generate cookbook cookbooks/my_cookbook

    Compiling Cookbooks...
Recipe: code_generator::cookbook
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
  2. Edit the default recipe of my_cookbook so that it creates a temporary file:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl cookbooks/my_cookbook/recipes/default.rb

    file "/tmp/local_mode.txt" do
    content "created by chef client local mode"
end

How to do it...

Let's run my_cookbook on your local workstation using Chef client's local mode:

  1. Run the Chef client locally with my_cookbook in the run list:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ chef-client -z -o my_cookbook

    [2014-12-11T22:54:44+01:00] INFO: Starting chef-zero on host localhost, port 8889 with repository at repository at /Users/mma/work/chef-repo
[2014-12-11T22:54:44+01:00] INFO: Forking chef instance to converge...
Starting Chef Client, version 11.18.0.rc.1
[2014-12-11T22:54:44+01:00] INFO: *** Chef 11.18.0.rc.1 ***
[2014-12-11T22:54:44+01:00] INFO: Chef-client pid: 20179
[2014-12-11T22:54:47+01:00] WARN: Run List override has been provided.
[2014-12-11T22:54:47+01:00] WARN: Original Run List: []
[2014-12-11T22:54:47+01:00] WARN: Overridden Run List: [recipe[my_cookbook]]
[2014-12-11T22:54:47+01:00] INFO: Run List is [recipe[my_cookbook]]
[2014-12-11T22:54:47+01:00] INFO: Run List expands to [my_cookbook]
[2014-12-11T22:54:47+01:00] INFO: Starting Chef Run for webops
  2. Validate that the Chef client run creates the desired temporary file:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ cat /tmp/local_mode.txt

    created by chef client local mode%

How it works...

The -z parameter switches the Chef client into local mode. Local mode uses chef-zero—a simple, in-memory version of the Chef server provided by Chef DK—when converging the local workstation.

By providing the -o parameter, you override the run list of your local node so that the Chef client executes the default recipe from my_cookbook.

There's more...

Chef-zero saves all modifications made by your recipes to the local file system. It creates a JSON file containing all node attributes for your local workstation in the nodes directory. This way, the next time you run the Chef client in local mode, it will be aware of any changes your recipes made to the node.

Running knife in local mode

You can use knife in local mode, too. To set the run list of your node named laptop (instead of having to override it with -o), you can run the following command:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife node run_list add -z laptop 'recipe[my_cookbook]'

Moving to hosted Chef or your own Chef server

When you're done editing and testing your cookbooks on your local workstation with chef-zero, you can seamlessly upload them to hosted Chef or your own Chef server:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife upload /

laptop:
  run_list: recipe[my_cookbook]

See also

End of Section 14
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