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 Cookbook
  • Toc
  • feedback
Chef Cookbook

Chef Cookbook

By : Marschall
close
Chef Cookbook

Chef Cookbook

By: Marschall

Overview of this book

Chef is a configuration management tool that lets you automate your more cumbersome IT infrastructure processes and control a large network of computers (and virtual machines) from one master server. This book will help you solve everyday problems with your IT infrastructure with Chef. It will start with recipes that show you how to effectively manage your infrastructure and solve problems with users, applications, and automation. You will then come across a new testing framework, InSpec, to test any node in your infrastructure. Further on, you will learn to customize plugins and write cross-platform cookbooks depending on the platform. You will also install packages from a third-party repository and learn how to manage users and applications. Toward the end, you will build high-availability services and explore what Habitat is and how you can implement it.
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
How to do it…
How it works…
There's more…
See also
Defining cookbook dependencies
Managing cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf
Using custom knife plugins
Deleting a node from the Chef server
Developing recipes with local mode
Using roles
Using environments
Freezing cookbooks
Running the Chef client as a daemon
2
2. Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs
2. Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs
Introduction
Testing your Chef cookbooks with cookstyle and Rubocop
Flagging problems in your Chef cookbooks with Foodcritic
Test-driven development for cookbooks using ChefSpec
Compliance testing with InSpec
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 chef-shell
Using why-run mode to find out what a recipe might do
Debugging Chef client runs
Inspecting the results of your last Chef run
Using Reporting to keep track of all your Chef client runs
Raising and logging exceptions in recipes
Diff-ing cookbooks with knife
Using community exception and report 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
Creating your own custom resource
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 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
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
Enabling passwordless sudo
Managing NTP
Installing nginx from source
Creating nginx virtual hosts
Creating MySQL databases and users
Managing Ruby on Rails applications
Managing Varnish
Managing your local workstation with Chef Pantry
7
7. Servers and Cloud Infrastructure
7. Servers and Cloud Infrastructure
Introduction
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
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
Managing applications with Habitat
8
Index
Index

Using version control

Do you manually back up every file before you change it? And do you invent creative file name extensions such as _me and _you when you try to collaborate on a file? If you answer yes to any of these, it's time to rethink your processes.

A version control system (VCS) helps you stay sane when dealing with important files and collaborating on them.

Using version control is a fundamental part of any infrastructure automation. There are multiple solutions to manage source version control, including Git, SVN, Mercurial, and Perforce. Due to its popularity among the Chef community, we will be using Git. However, you could easily use any other version control system with Chef.

Note

Don't even think about building your infrastructure as code without using a version control system to manage it!

Getting ready

You'll need Git installed on your local workstation. Either use your operating system's package manager (such as Apt on Ubuntu or Homebrew on OS X, or simply download the installer from www.git-scm.org.

Git is a distributed version control system. This means that you don't necessarily need a central host to store your repositories. However, in practice, using GitHub as your central repository has proven to be very helpful. In this book, I'll assume that you're using GitHub. Therefore, you need to go to www.github.com and create an account (which is free) to follow the instructions given in this book. Make sure that you upload your Secure Shell (SSH) key by following the instructions at https://help.github.com/articles/generating-ssh-keys, so that you're able to use the SSH protocol to interact with your GitHub account.

As soon as you have created your GitHub account, you should create your repository by visiting https://github.com and using chef-repo as the repository name.

Make sure you have wget installed on your local workstation, to be able to download the required files from public servers.

How to do it…

Before you can write any cookbooks, you need to set up your initial Git repository on your development box. Chef Software, Inc. provides an empty Chef repository to get you started. Let's see how you can set up your own Chef repository with Git, using Chef's skeleton:

  1. Download Chef's skeleton repository as a tarball:
    mma@laptop $ wget http://github.com/chef/chef-repo/tarball/master
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
2016-09-28 20:54:41 (9.26 MB/s) - 'master' saved [7332/7332]
  2. Extract the downloaded tarball:
    mma@laptop $ tar xzvf master
  3. Rename the directory:
    mma@laptop:~ $ mv chef-boneyard-chef-repo-* chef-repo
  4. Change to your newly created Chef repository:
    mma@laptop:~ $ cd chef-repo/
  5. Initialize a fresh Git repository:
    git init .
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/mma/work/chef-repo/.git/
  6. Connect your local repository to your remote repository on github.com. Make sure to replace mmarschall with your own GitHub username:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ git remote add origin [email protected]:mmarschall/chef-repo.git
  7. Configure Git with your user name and e-mail address:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ git config --global user.name "Your Name"
  8. Add and commit Chef's default directory structure:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ git add .
mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ git commit -m "initial commit"
[master (root-commit) 6148b20] initial commit
 11 files changed, 545 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 .gitignore
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
create mode 100644 roles/README.md
  9. Push your initialized repository to GitHub. This makes it available to all your co-workers to collaborate on:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ git push -u origin master
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
To [email protected]:mmarschall/chef-repo.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master

How it works…

You have downloaded a tarball containing Chef's skeleton repository. Then, you initialized chef-repo and connected it to your own repository on GitHub.

After that, you added all the files from the tarball to your repository and committed them. This makes Git track your files and the changes you make later.

Finally, you pushed your repository to GitHub, so that your co-workers can use your code too.

There's more...

Let's assume you're working on the same chef-repo repository, together with your co-workers. They cloned the repository, added a new cookbook called other_cookbook, committed their changes locally, and pushed to GitHub. Now, it's time for you to get the new cookbook downloaded to your own laptop.

Pull your co-workers' changes from GitHub. This will merge their changes into your local copy of the repository. Use the pull subcommand:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ git pull --rebase
From github.com:mmarschall/chef-repo
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
create mode 100644 cookbooks/other_cookbook/recipes/default.rb

In the event of any conflicting changes, Git will help you merge and resolve them.

See also

End of Section 3
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