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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

Using roles

Roles are there in Chef to group nodes with similar configuration. Typical cases are to have roles for web servers, database servers, and so on.

You can set custom run lists for all the nodes in your roles and override attribute values from within your roles.

Let's see how to create a simple role.

Getting ready

For the following examples, I assume that you have a node named server and that you have at least one cookbook (I'll use the ntp cookbook) registered with your Chef server.

How to do it...

Let's create a role and see what we can do with it.

  1. Create a role:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl roles/web_servers.rb

    name "web_servers"
description "This role contains nodes, which act as web servers"
run_list "recipe[ntp]"
default_attributes 'ntp' => {
  'ntpdate' => {
    'disable' => true
  }
}
  2. Upload the role on the Chef server:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife role from file web_servers.rb

    Updated Role web_servers!
  3. Assign the role to a node called server:
    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife node run_list add server 'role[web_servers]'

    server:
  run_list: role[web_servers]
  4. Run the Chef client:
    user@server:~$ sudo chef-client

    ...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
[2014-12-25T13:28:24+00:00] INFO: Run List is [role[web_servers]]
[2014-12-25T13:28:24+00:00] INFO: Run List expands to [ntp]
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...

How it works...

You define a role in a Ruby file inside the roles folder of your Chef repository. A role consists of a name attribute and a description attribute. Additionally, a role usually contains a role-specific run list and role-specific attribute settings.

Every node, which has a role in its run list, will have the role's run list expanded into its own. This means that all the recipes (and roles), which are in the role's run list, will be executed on your nodes.

You need to upload your role on your Chef server by using the knife role from file command.

Only then should you add the role to your node's run list.

Running the Chef client on a node having your role in its run list will execute all the recipes listed in the role.

The attributes you define in your role will be merged with attributes from environments and cookbooks, according to the precedence rules described at https://docs.chef.io/roles.html#attribute-precedence.

See also

  • Find out how roles can help you in finding nodes in the Using search to find nodes recipe in Chapter 4, Writing Better Cookbooks
  • Learn more about in the Overriding attributes recipe in Chapter 4, Writing Better Cookbooks
  • Read everything about roles at https://docs.chef.io/roles.html
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