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  • Chef Cookbook
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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

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 a 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 (1.6.0)
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
knife-ec2 (0.13.0)
...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-ec2-0.13.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed knife-ec2-0.13.0
...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 in various places.

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

./.chef/plugins/knife/

Then, it looks into the .chef directory, which is located in your home directory, to find 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, among 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 15
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