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.

You need only a single Ubuntu machine to get started. This book contains a step-by-step guide to set up a development environment. Once you have successfully installed everything, you can easily reproduce the same on multiple machines.

This book is for system administrators and system engineers who have an understanding of configuration management tools and infrastructure. It helps you to understand the need for these tools and provides you with a step-by-step guide to maintain your existing infrastructure. It also contains the most frequently used application recipes to get started immediately.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The solo.rb file is used to specify all the configuration details."

A block of code is set as follows:

{
     "run_list":[
        "recipe[nginx::default]",
        "recipe[git::default]",
    ]
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

# To update
execute "update apt" do
  command "apt-get update --fix-missing"
end

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install curl

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "It should display the Welcome to nginx! page."

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