Book Image

Chef Essentials

By : John Ewart
Book Image

Chef Essentials

By: John Ewart

Overview of this book

<p>Chef is a configuration management tool that turns IT infrastructure into code. Chef provides tools to manage systems at scale. With this book, you will learn how to use the same tools that companies such as Facebook, Riot Games, and Ancestry.com use to manage and scale their infrastructure.</p> <p>This book takes you on a comprehensive tour of Chef's functionality, ranging from its core features to advanced development. You will be brought up to speed with what's new in Chef and how to set up your own Chef infrastructure for individuals, or small or large teams. Once you have the core components, you will get to grips with bootstrapping hosts to then develop and apply cookbooks. If you want to fully leverage Chef, this book will show you advanced recipes to help you handle new types of data providers and resources. By the end of this book, you will be confident in how to manage your infrastructure, scale using the cloud, and extend the built-in functionality of Chef itself.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Chef Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Testing recipes


There are a number of ways to test your recipes. One approach is to simply follow the process of developing your recipes, uploading them to your Chef server, and deploying them to a host; repeat this until you are satisfied. This has the benefit of executing your recipes on real instances, but the drawback is that it is slow, particularly if you are testing on multiple platforms, and requires that you maintain a fleet of hosts. If your cookbook run times are reasonably short and you have a small number of platforms to support them, then this might be a viable option. There is a better option to test your recipes, and it is called ChefSpec. For those who have used RSpec, a Ruby testing library, these examples will be a natural extension of RSpec. If you have never used RSpec, the beginning of this chapter will introduce you to RSpec's testing language and mechanisms.