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Chef Cookbook

Chef Cookbook

By : Marschall
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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)
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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
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

Creating and using cookbooks

Cookbooks are an essential part of Chef. Basically, you describe the configurations you want to apply to your nodes in cookbooks. You can create them using the Chef executable installed by the Chef DK.

In this recipe, we'll create and apply a simple cookbook using the chef and knife command-line tools.

Getting ready

Make sure you have Chef DK installed and a node available for testing. Check out the installation instructions at http://learn.chef.io if you need help here.

Edit your knife.rb file (usually found in the hidden .chef directory) and add the following three lines to it, filling in your own values:

cookbook_copyright "your company"
cookbook_license "apachev2"
cookbook_email "your email address"

Note

The Apache 2 license is the most commonly license found in cookbooks, but you're free to choose whichever suits your needs. If you put none as cookbook_license, knife will put All rights reserved into your recipe's metadata file.

Chef will use the preceding values as the defaults whenever you create a new cookbook. We assume that you have a node called server registered with your Chef server, as described in the Managing virtual machines with Vagrant section in this chapter.

How to do it…

Carry out the following steps to create and use cookbooks:

  1. Create a cookbook named my_cookbook by running the following command:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ chef generate cookbook cookbooks/my_cookbook
Generating cookbook my_cookbook
- Ensuring correct cookbook file content
- Ensuring delivery configuration
- Ensuring correct delivery build cookbook content

Your cookbook is ready. Type `cd cookbooks/my_cookbook` to enter it.
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
  2. Upload your new cookbook on the Chef server:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife cookbook upload my_cookbook
Uploading my_cookbook    [0.1.0]
Uploaded 1 cookbook.
  3. Add the cookbook to your node's run list. In this example, the name of the node is server:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife node run_list add server 'recipe[my_cookbook]'
server:
  run_list: recipe[my_cookbook]
  4. Run the Chef client on your node:
    user@server:~$ sudo chef-client

Tip

If you're using a Vagrant VM as your server, you need to make sure to run vagrant up and vagrant ssh to be able to execute the Chef client on the node.

How it works…

The chef executable helps you to manage your local Chef Development environment. We used it here to generate the cookbook.

Knife is the command-line interface for the Chef server. It uses the RESTful API exposed by the Chef server to do its work and helps you to interact with the Chef server.

The knife command supports a host of commands structured as follows:

knife <subject> <command>

The <subject> used in this section is either cookbook or node. The commands we use are upload for the cookbook, and run_list add for the node.

There's more…

Before uploading your cookbook to the Chef server, it's a good idea to run it in Test Kitchen first. Test Kitchen will spin up a virtual machine, execute your cookbook, and destroy the virtual machine again. That way you can evaluate what your cookbook does before you upload it to the Chef server and run it on real nodes.

To run your cookbook with Test Kitchen on an Ubuntu 16.04 virtual machine, execute the following steps:

  1. Create a configuration file for Test Kitchen for executing the default recipe of my_cookbook:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl .kitchen.yml
---
driver:
  name: vagrant

provisioner:
  name: chef_zero

platforms:
  - name: ubuntu-16.04

suites:
  - name: default
    run_list:
      - recipe[my_cookbook::default]
 attributes:
  2. Run kitchen test to execute the default recipe of my_cookbook:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ kitchen test
-----> Starting Kitchen (v1.13.2)
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
-----> Kitchen is finished. (0m45.42s)

See also

  • Learn how to use Test Kitchen to evaluate your cookbooks before uploading them to the Chef server in the Integration-testing your Chef cookbooks with Test Kitchen recipe in Chapter 2, Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs
  • Learn how to set up your Chef server in the Using the hosted Chef platform recipe in this chapter
End of Section 7
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