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  • Book Overview & Buying Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition
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Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

By : Matthias Marschall
3.7 (6)
Buy this Book
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Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

3.7 (6)
By: Matthias Marschall
Buy this Book

Overview of this book

This book is for system engineers and administrators who have a fundamental understanding of information management systems and infrastructure. It helps if you've already played around with Chef; however, this book covers all the important topics you will need to know. If you don't want to dig through a whole book before you can get started, this book is for you, as it features a set of independent recipes you can try out immediately.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
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Preface
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Preface
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What this book covers
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What you need for this book
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Who this book is for
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Sections
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Conventions
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Reader feedback
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Customer support
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1
1. Chef Infrastructure
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1. Chef Infrastructure
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Introduction
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Using version control
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Installing the Chef development kit on your workstation
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Using the hosted Chef platform
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Managing virtual machines with Vagrant
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Creating and using cookbooks
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Inspecting files on your Chef server with knife
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Defining cookbook dependencies
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Managing cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf
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Downloading and integrating cookbooks as vendor branches into your Git repository
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Using custom knife plugins
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Deleting a node from the Chef server
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Developing recipes with local mode
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Using roles
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Using environments
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Freezing cookbooks
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Running Chef client as a daemon
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Using chef-shell
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2. Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs
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2. Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs
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Introduction
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Testing your Chef cookbooks
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Flagging problems in your Chef cookbooks
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Test-driven development for cookbooks using ChefSpec
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Integration testing your Chef cookbooks with Test Kitchen
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Showing affected nodes before uploading cookbooks
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Overriding a node's run list to execute a single recipe
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Using why-run mode to find out what a recipe might do
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Debugging Chef client runs
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Inspecting the results of your last Chef run
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Raising and logging exceptions in recipes
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Diff-ing cookbooks with knife
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Using community exception and report handlers
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Creating custom handlers
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3. Chef Language and Style
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3. Chef Language and Style
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Introduction
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Using community Chef style
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Using attributes to dynamically configure recipes
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Using templates
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Mixing plain Ruby with Chef DSL
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Installing Ruby gems and using them in recipes
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Using libraries
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Using definitions
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Creating your own Lightweight Resource Providers (LWRP)
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Extending community cookbooks by using application wrapper cookbooks
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Creating custom Ohai plugins
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Creating custom knife plugins
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4. Writing Better Cookbooks
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4. Writing Better Cookbooks
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Introduction
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Setting the environment variables
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Passing arguments to shell commands
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Overriding attributes
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Using search to find nodes
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Using data bags
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Using search to find data bag items
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Using encrypted data bag items
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Accessing data bag values from external scripts
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Getting information about the environment
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Writing cross-platform cookbooks
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Finding the complete list of operating systems you can use in cookbooks
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Making recipes idempotent by using conditional execution
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5. Working with Files and Packages
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5. Working with Files and Packages
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Introduction
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Creating configuration files using templates
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Using pure Ruby in templates for conditionals and iterations
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Installing packages from a third-party repository
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Installing software from source
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Running a command when a file is updated
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Distributing directory trees
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Cleaning up old files
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Distributing different files based on the target platform
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6. Users and Applications
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6. Users and Applications
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Introduction
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Creating users from data bags
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Securing the Secure Shell Daemon (SSHD)
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Enabling passwordless sudo
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Managing NTP
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Managing nginx
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Creating nginx virtual hosts
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Creating MySQL databases and users
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Managing WordPress sites
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Managing Ruby on Rails applications
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Managing Varnish
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Managing your local workstation
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7. Servers and Cloud Infrastructure
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7. Servers and Cloud Infrastructure
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Introduction
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Creating your infrastructure using Chef Provisioning
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Creating cookbooks from a running system with Blueprint
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Running the same command on many machines at once
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Setting up SNMP for external monitoring services
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Deploying a Nagios monitoring server
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Building high-availability services using heartbeat
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Using HAProxy to load-balance multiple web servers
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Using custom bootstrap scripts
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Managing firewalls with iptables
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Managing fail2ban to ban malicious IP addresses
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Managing Amazon EC2 instances
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Loading your Chef infrastructure from a file with spiceweasel and knife
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Index
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Index

Creating and using cookbooks

Cookbooks are an essential part of Chef. You can easily create them using the Chef executable installed by the Chef DK. In this recipe (and many of the following recipes), I will assume that you're using a Chef server to manage your infrastructure. You can either set up your own cookbook or use the hosted Chef as described previously. You'll use the command-line tool knife to interact with the Chef server.

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 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 default 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

    Compiling Cookbooks...
Recipe: code_generator::cookbook


...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...

    Before ChefDK was introduced, the only way to generate cookbooks was to use knife cookbook create my_cookbook

  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 in order 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.

See also

  • Learn how to set up your Chef server in the Using the hosted Chef platform recipe in this chapter
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