Chapter 1, Chef Infrastructure helps you to get started with Chef. It explains some key concepts such as cookbooks, roles, and environments and shows you how to use some basic tools such as it, Knife, Chef Shell, Vagrant and Berkshelf.

Chapter 2, Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs is all about getting your cookbooks right. It covers logging debugging as well as the why-run mode and shows you how to develop your cookbooks totally test driven.

Chapter 3, Chef Language and Style covers additional Chef concepts such as attributes, templates, libraries and even Light Weight Resource Providers. It shows you how to use plain old Ruby inside your recipes and ends with writing your own Ohai and Knife plugins.

Chapter 4, Writing Better Cookbooks shows you how to make your cookbooks more flexible. It covers ways to override attributes, use data bags and search, and to make your cookbooks idempotent. Writing cross-platform cookbooks is covered as well.

Chapter 5, Working with Files and Packages covers powerful techniques to manage configuration files and to install and manage software packages. It tells you how to install software from source and how to manage whole directory trees.

Chapter 6, Users and Applications shows you how to manage user accounts, securing SSH and configuring sudo. Then, it walks you through installing complete applications such as nginx, MySQL, Wordpress, Ruby on Rails, and Varnish. It ends by showing you how to manage your own OS X workstation with Chef.

Chapter 7, Servers and Cloud Infrastructure deals with networking and applications spanning multiple servers. You'll learn how to set up high-availability services and load-balancers and how to monitor your whole infrastructure with Nagios. Finally, it'll show you how to manage your Amazon EC2 cloud with Chef.

To run the examples in this book you'll need a computer running OS X or Ubuntu Linux 12.04. The examples will use Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com/) as the editor. Make sure you've configured its command-line tool, subl, to follow along smoothly.

It helps if you've Ruby 1.9.3 with Bundler (http://bundler.io/) installed on your box as well.

This book is for system engineers and administrators who have a fundamental understanding of information management systems and infrastructure. It helps if you've already played around with Chef; however, the book covers all the important topics you will need to know. If you don't want to dig through a whole book before you can get started, this book is for you, as it features a set of independent recipes you can try out immediately.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The Omnibus Installer will download Ruby and all required Ruby gems into /opt/chef/embedded."

A block of code is set as follows:

name "web_servers"
description "This role contains nodes, which act as web servers"
run_list "recipe[ntp]"
default_attributes 'ntp' => {
  'ntpdate' => {
    'disable' => true
  }
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

name "web_servers"
description "This role contains nodes, which act as web servers"
run_list "recipe[ntp]"
default_attributes 'ntp' => {
  'ntpdate' => {
    'disable' => true
  }
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife role from file web_servers.rb

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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