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

Distributing directory trees


You need to seed a directory tree on your nodes. It might be a static website or some backup data that is needed on your nodes. You want Chef to make sure that all the files and directories are there on your nodes. Chef offers the remote_directory resource to handle this scenario. Let's see how you can use it.

Getting ready

Make sure you have a cookbook called my_cookbook, and that the run_list of your node includes my_cookbook, as described in the Creating and using cookbooks recipe in Chapter 1, Chef Infrastructure.

How to do it…

Let's upload a directory with some files to our node:

  1. Edit your cookbook's default recipe:

    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl cookbooks/my_cookbook/recipes/default.rb
    remote_directory "/tmp/chef.github.com" do
      files_backup 10
      files_owner "root"
      files_group "root"
      files_mode 00644
      owner "root"
      group "root"
      mode 00755
    end
    
  2. Create a directory structure on your workstation with files that you want to upload to your node. In this example...