Chapter 1, Chef Infrastructure, helps you to get started with Chef. It explains some key concepts, such as cookbooks, roles, and environments, and shows you how to use some basic tools like the Chef development kit (ChefDK), such as Git, knife, chef shell, Vagrant, and Berkshelf.

Chapter 2, Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs, is all about getting your cookbooks right. It covers logging and debugging as well as the why run mode, and shows you how to develop your cookbooks totally test driven.

Chapter 3, Chef Language and Style, covers additional Chef concepts, such as attributes, templates, libraries, and even Light Weight Resource Providers. It shows you how to use plain old Ruby inside your recipes and ends with writing your own Ohai and knife plugins.

Chapter 4, Writing Better Cookbooks, shows you how to make your cookbooks more flexible. It covers ways to override attributes, use data bags and search, and to make your cookbooks idempotent. Writing cross-platform cookbooks is covered as well.

Chapter 5, Working with Files and Packages, covers powerful techniques to manage configuration files, and install and manage software packages. It shows you how to install software from source and how to manage whole directory trees.

Chapter 6, Users and Applications, shows you how to manage user accounts, securing SSH and configuring sudo. Then, it walks you through installing complete applications, such as nginx, MySQL, WordPress, Ruby on Rails, and Varnish. It ends by showing you how to manage your own OS X workstation with Chef.

Chapter 7, Servers and Cloud Infrastructure, deals with networking and applications spanning multiple servers. You'll learn how to create your whole infrastructure using Chef provisioning. Then it shows you how to set up high-availability services and load-balancers, and how to monitor your whole infrastructure with Nagios. Finally, it'll show you how to manage your Amazon EC2 Cloud with Chef.

To run the examples in this book, you'll need a computer running OS X or Ubuntu Linux 14.04. The examples will use Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com/) as the editor. Make sure you configured Sublime text command-line tool subl to follow along smoothly.

It helps if you have Ruby 2.1.0 with bundler (http://bundler.io/) installed on your system as well.

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.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it…, How it works…, There's more…, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles 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 omnibus installer will download Ruby and all required Ruby gems into /opt/chef/embedded."

A block of code is set as follows:

name "web_servers"
description "This role contains nodes, which act as web servers"
run_list "recipe[ntp]"
default_attributes 'ntp' => {
  'ntpdate' => {
    'disable' => true
  }
}

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

name "web_servers"
description "This role contains nodes, which act as web servers"
run_list "recipe[ntp]"
default_attributes 'ntp' => {
  'ntpdate' => {
    'disable' => true
  }
}

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

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife role from file web_servers.rb

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Open http://requestb.in in your browser and click on Create a RequestBin."

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.