What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Chef and Chef-Solo, explains about Chef, chef-client, and Chef-Solo. It explains about the core concepts in Chef and the terminologies with some use cases.

Chapter 2, Setting Up an Environment for Chef-Solo, guides you to install Chef-Solo on your Ubuntu machine, and discusses cookbooks and their structure in detail. It also provides step-by-step instructions on how to run cookbooks using Chef-Solo with custom configurations.

Chapter 3, Setting Up a Development Environment, explains virtual machines and their providers. In this chapter, we will set up the development environment using Vagrant and execute some sample recipes.

Chapter 4, Developing Cookbooks, looks deeper into developing recipes and how to manage the recipes in cookbooks. It also provides more detailed information on metadata, attributes, templates, files, resources, and data bags. Also, it includes some tools to manage and create cookbooks, for example, Knife and Berkshelf.

Chapter 5, More about Cookbooks and Recipes, continues with the last chapter's cookbooks and manages the remaining contents with files and templates. This chapter includes Python/Django cookbooks and information about upstream service.

Chapter 6, Chef-Solo and Docker, covers the installation of Docker and creation of Docker images using Chef-Solo. Also, this chapter includes some recommendations on how to work on recipes of ongoing projects and keep them aligned with Chef-Solo.