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

Managing the cookbooks


The cookbooks that we will be using are all available at the following URL: https://github.com/johnewart/simplewebpy_app. Because a number of cookbooks used in this example are under active development, the ones required for the examples have been frozen (as of writing of this book) to ensure compatibility with the examples; it is better to have them slightly out of date than broken in this case.

However, when you write your own cookbooks and deploy your own software beyond this example, you will find that there are a large number of cookbooks that can be found through the Chef community site—http://supermarket.getchef.com/—or by searching the Web for cookbooks; many of these will be hosted on GitHub, BitBucket, or similar source code-hosting sites.

Downloading cookbooks

Here in the following code, we will simply download the cookbook collection as a whole:

http://github.com/johnewart/chef_essential_files

To install the collection, we can do the following from the chef_essential_files...