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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
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
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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 data bags

There are situations where you have data, which you neither want to hard code in your recipes nor store as attributes in your cookbooks. Users, external servers, or database connections are examples of such data. Chef offers so-called data bags to manage arbitrary collections of data, which you can use with your cookbooks.

Let's see how we can create and use a data bag and its items.

Getting ready

In the following example, we want to illustrate the usage of data bags by sending HTTP requests to a configurable HTTP endpoint. We don't want to hardcode the HTTP endpoint in our recipe. That's why we store it as a data bag item in a data bag.

To be able to follow along with the example, you'll need an HTTP endpoint.

One way to establish an HTTP endpoint is to just run sudo nc –l 80 on any server accessible by your node and use its IP address below.

Another way to establish an HTTP endpoint, which shows us the requests we make, is a free service called RequestBin. To use it, follow these...

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