While creating a new node, you need to make sure that it has Chef installed on it. Knife offers the bootstrap subcommand to connect to a node via Secure Shell (SSH) and run a bootstrap script on the node.
The bootstrap script should install the Chef client on your node and register the node with your Chef server. Chef comes with a few default bootstrap scripts for various platforms. There are options to install the Chef client using the Omnibus installer packages, or Ruby gems.
If you want to modify the way your Chef client gets installed on your nodes, you can create and use custom bootstrap scripts.
Let's take a look at how to do this.
Make sure that you have a node that is ready to become a Chef client and can SSH into it. In the following example, we'll assume that you have a username and password to log in to your node.