Having all your cookbooks, roles, and data bags as code under version control is great, but having your repository alone is not enough to be able to spin up your complete environment from scratch again. Starting from the repository alone, you will need to spin up nodes, upload cookbooks to your Chef server, and recreate data bags there.

Especially when you use a Cloud provider to spin up your nodes, it would be great if you could spin up your nodes automatically and hook them up to your freshly created and filled Chef server.

The spiceweasel tool lets you define all your cookbooks, data bags, and nodes, and generates all the necessary knife commands to recreate your complete environment, including spinning up nodes and populating your empty Chef server or organization on the hosted Chef.

Let's see how to dump our current repository to spiceweasel and how to recreate our infrastructure with it.