Book Image

Chef Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Matthias Marschall
Book Image

Chef Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Matthias Marschall

Overview of this book

Chef is a configuration management tool that lets you automate your more cumbersome IT infrastructure processes and control a large network of computers (and virtual machines) from one master server. This book will help you solve everyday problems with your IT infrastructure with Chef. It will start with recipes that show you how to effectively manage your infrastructure and solve problems with users, applications, and automation. You will then come across a new testing framework, InSpec, to test any node in your infrastructure. Further on, you will learn to customize plugins and write cross-platform cookbooks depending on the platform. You will also install packages from a third-party repository and learn how to manage users and applications. Toward the end, you will build high-availability services and explore what Habitat is and how you can implement it.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Chef Cookbook - Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Using custom bootstrap scripts


While creating a new node, you need to make sure that it has Chef installed on it. Knife offers the bootstrap subcommand to connect to a node via Secure Shell (SSH) and run a bootstrap script on the node.

The bootstrap script should install the Chef client on your node and register the node with your Chef server. Chef comes with a few default bootstrap scripts for various platforms. There are options to install the Chef client using the Omnibus installer packages, or Ruby gems.

If you want to modify the way your Chef client gets installed on your nodes, you can create and use custom bootstrap scripts.

Let's look at how to do this.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have a node that is ready to become a Chef client and can SSH into it. In the following example, we'll assume that you have a username and password to log in to your node.

How to do it…

Let's see how to execute our custom bootstrap script with knife to make our node a Chef client:

  1. Create your basic bootstrap...