Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

By : Matthias Marschall

Buy this Book

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

By: Matthias Marschall

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Irrespective of whether you're a systems administrator or a developer, if you're sick and tired of repetitive manual work and not knowing whether you may dare to reboot your server, it's time for you to get your infrastructure automated. Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook has all the required recipes to configure, deploy, and scale your servers and applications, irrespective of whether you manage 5 servers, 5,000 servers, or 500,000 servers. Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook is a collection of easy-to-follow, step-by-step recipes showing you how to solve real-world automation challenges. Learn techniques from the pros and make sure you get your infrastructure automation project right the first time. Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook takes you on a journey through the many facets of Chef. It teaches you simple techniques as well as fully fledged real-world solutions. By looking at easily digestible examples, you'll be able to grasp the main concepts of Chef, which you'll need for automating your own infrastructure. Instead of wasting time trying to get existing community cookbooks running in your environment, you'll get ready made code examples to get you started. After describing how to use the basic Chef tools, the book shows you how to troubleshoot your work and explains the Chef language. Then, it shows you how to manage users, applications, and your whole cloud infrastructure. The book concludes by providing you additional, indispensable tools and giving you an in-depth look into the Chef ecosystem. Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook will help you learn the techniques of the pros by walking you through a host of step-by-step guides to solve real-world infrastructure automation challenges.

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

Credits

Foreword

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Chef Infrastructure

Introduction

Using version control

Installing Chef on your workstation

Using the Hosted Chef platform

Managing virtual machines with Vagrant

Creating and using cookbooks

Inspecting files on your Chef Server with Knife

Defining cookbook dependencies

Managing cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf

Downloading and integrating cookbooks as vendor branches into your Git repository

Using custom Knife plugins

Changing organizations based on the current Git branch

Deleting a node from the Chef Server

Running Chef Client as a daemon

Using the Chef console (Chef Shell)

Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs

Introduction

Testing your Chef cookbooks

Flagging problems in your Chef cookbooks

Test Driven Development for cookbooks using ChefSpec

Integration testing your cookbooks with Test Kitchen

Showing affected nodes before uploading cookbooks

Overriding a node's run list to execute a single recipe

Using why-run mode to find out what a recipe might do

Debugging Chef Client runs

Inspecting results of your last ChefClient run

Raising and logging exceptions in recipes

Diffing cookbooks with knife

Using community exception and report handlers

Creating custom handlers

Chef Language and Style

Introduction

Using community Chef style

Using attributes to dynamically configure recipes

Using templates

Mixing plain Ruby with Chef DSL

Installing Ruby gems and using them in recipes

Using libraries

Using definitions

Creating your own Light Weight Resource Providers (LWRP)

Extending community cookbooks by using application wrapper cookbooks

Creating custom Ohai plugins

Creating custom Knife plugins

Writing Better Cookbooks

Introduction

Setting environment variables

Passing arguments to shell commands

Overriding attributes

Using search to find nodes

Using data bags

Using search to find data bag items

Using encrypted data bag items

Accessing data bag values from external scripts

Getting information about the environment

Writing cross-platform cookbooks

Finding the complete list of operating systems you can use in cookbooks

Making recipes idempotent by using conditional execution

Working with Files and Packages

Introduction

Creating configuration files using templates

Using pure Ruby in templates for conditionals and iterations

Installing packages from a third-party repository

Installing software from source

Running a command when a file is updated

Distributing directory trees

Cleaning up old files

Distributing different files based on the target platform

Users and Applications

Introduction

Creating users from data bags

Securing the Secure Shell Daemon (SSHD)

Enabling passwordless sudo

Managing NTP

Managing nginx

Creating nginx sites

Creating MySQL databases and users

Managing WordPress sites

Managing Ruby on Rails applications

Managing Varnish

Managing your workstation

Servers and Cloud Infrastructure

Introduction

Creating cookbooks from a running system with Blueprint

Running the same command on many machines at once

Setting up SNMP for external monitoring services

Deploying a Nagios monitoring server

Building high-availability services using Heartbeat

Using HAProxy to load-balance multiple web servers

Using custom bootstrap scripts

Managing firewalls with iptables

Managing fail2ban to ban malicious IP addresses

Managing Amazon EC2 instances

Loading your Chef infrastructure from a file with spiceweasel and Knife

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: August 2013

Production Reference: 1200813

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK

ISBN 978-1-84951-922-9

www.packtpub.com

Cover Image by Matthias Marschall (<[email protected]>)

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

By : Matthias Marschall

Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

By: Matthias Marschall

Overview of this book

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Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

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