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  • Book Overview & Buying Chef Cookbook
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Chef Cookbook

Chef Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Matthias Marschall
Buy this Book
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Chef Cookbook

Chef Cookbook

By: Matthias Marschall
Buy this Book

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 (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
Lock Free Chapter
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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How to do it…
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How it works…
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There's more…
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See also
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Defining cookbook dependencies
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Managing cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf
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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 the Chef client as a daemon
2
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 with cookstyle and Rubocop
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Flagging problems in your Chef cookbooks with Foodcritic
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Test-driven development for cookbooks using ChefSpec
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Compliance testing with InSpec
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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 chef-shell
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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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Using Reporting to keep track of all your Chef client runs
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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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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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Creating your own custom resource
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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 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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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
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Enabling passwordless sudo
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Managing NTP
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Installing nginx from source
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Creating nginx virtual hosts
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Creating MySQL databases and users
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Managing Ruby on Rails applications
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Managing Varnish
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Managing your local workstation with Chef Pantry
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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 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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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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Managing applications with Habitat
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Index
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Index

Overriding a node's run list to execute a single recipe

Even though we do not want to do a full Chef client run, we might need to run, for example, the users cookbook, in order to add a new colleague to a server. This is where the Chef client's feature to override a run list in order to execute a single recipe comes in very handy.

Note

Only use this feature when you absolutely must! It is bad practice because it breaks the principles of desired state config and single source of truth.

Getting ready

To follow along with the following example, you'll need a node hooked up to your Chef server having multiple recipes and/or roles in its run list.

How to do it...

Let's see how to run a single recipe out of a bigger run list on your node:

  1. Show the data for your node. In this example, the node has the role base in its run list. Depending on your setup, you'll find other data here:

    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife node show www.example.com
...TRUNCATED OUTPUT…
Run List:    role[base]
Roles:       base
Recipes...
CONTINUE READING
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Tech Concepts
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Programming languages
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Chef Cookbook
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