Book Image

Chef Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Matthias Marschall
Book Image

Chef Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Matthias Marschall

Overview of this book

Chef is a configuration management tool that lets you automate your more cumbersome IT infrastructure processes and control a large network of computers (and virtual machines) from one master server. This book will help you solve everyday problems with your IT infrastructure with Chef. It will start with recipes that show you how to effectively manage your infrastructure and solve problems with users, applications, and automation. You will then come across a new testing framework, InSpec, to test any node in your infrastructure. Further on, you will learn to customize plugins and write cross-platform cookbooks depending on the platform. You will also install packages from a third-party repository and learn how to manage users and applications. Toward the end, you will build high-availability services and explore what Habitat is and how you can implement it.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Chef Cookbook - Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Chef Infrastructure

"What made Manhattan Manhattan was the underground infrastructure, that engineering marvel."

Andrew Cuomo

A well-engineered infrastructure builds the basis for successful companies. In this chapter, we will see how to set up an infrastructure around Chef as the basis of your infrastructure as code. We'll cover the following recipes in this chapter:

  • Using version control

  • Installing the Chef Development Kit on your workstation

  • Using the hosted Chef platform

  • Managing virtual machines with Vagrant

  • Creating and using cookbooks

  • Inspecting files on your Chef server with knife

  • Defining cookbook dependencies

  • Managing cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf

  • Using custom knife plugins

  • Deleting a node from the Chef server

  • Developing recipes with local mode

  • Using roles

  • Using environments

  • Freezing cookbooks

  • Running the Chef client as a daemon