Book Image

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

By : Matthias Marschall
Book Image

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

By: Matthias Marschall

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting information about the environment


Sometimes, your recipes need to know details about the environment they are modifying. I'm not talking about Chef environments but about things such as Linux kernel versions, existing users, and network interfaces.

Chef provides all this information via the node object. Let's take a look at how to retrieve it.

Getting ready

Log in to any of your Chef managed nodes and start the chef-shell:

user@server:~$ sudo chef-shell --client
chef >

How to do it...

Let's play around with the node object and take a look at what information it stores:

  1. List which information is available. The example shows the keys available on a Vagrant VM. Depending on what kind of server you work on, you'll find different data, as shown in the following:

    chef > node.keys.sort
    
    => ["block_device", "chef_packages", "command", "counters", "cpu", "current_user", "dmi", "domain", "etc", "filesystem", "fqdn", "hostname", "idletime", "idletime_seconds", "ip6address", "ipaddress"...