Chef is another provisioning tool supported by Vagrant that makes it easy for us to take a base operating system installation and turn it into a full-fledged server suited to the needs of our project.
In this chapter, we will quickly take a look at the basics of Chef. We won't look at it within a Vagrant context just yet; we will simply take a look at how Chef works, and how we can use it. In Chapter 6, Provisioning Vagrant Machines with Puppet, Ansible, and Chef, we will take a look at how to connect what we will learn in this chapter with Vagrant itself. In this chapter, we will learn the following topics:
How Chef works
The basics behind Chef cookbooks and recipes
How to use Chef to perform the following tasks:
Installing software
Managing files and folders within the filesystem
Managing cron jobs
Running commands
Managing users and groups
How to use third-party Chef cookbooks and recipes
How to manually run Chef to provision a machine
Chef itself is a large topic and the subject...