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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

Developing recipes with local mode

If running your own Chef server seems like 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"
    action :create
end

How to do it…

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

  1. Run the Chef client locally with my_cookbook in the run list:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ chef-client --local-mode -o my_cookbook
[2016-10-03T20:37:02+02:00] INFO: Started chef-zero at chefzero://localhost:8889 with repository at /Users/matthias.marschall/chef-repo
  One version per cookbook

[2016-10-03T20:37:02+02:00] INFO: Forking chef instance to converge...
Starting Chef Client, version 12.14.89
[2016-10-03T20:37:02+02:00] INFO: *** Chef 12.14.89 ***
[2016-10-03T20:37:02+02:00] INFO: Platform: x86_64-darwin13
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
Chef Client finished, 1/1 resources updated in 04 seconds
  2. Validate that the Chef client run creates the desired temporary file on your local workstation:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ cat /tmp/local_mode.txt
created by chef client local mode

How it works…

The --local-mode (short form: -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 filesystem. 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 a 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:

Note

Make sure you bump the version number of modified cookbooks in their metadata.rb file and commit them to your version control system before uploading to the Chef Server.

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ berks upload
Uploaded ...

See also

End of Section 17
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