Chef Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Key Features

• Immediately apply Devops techniques and methods, then combine them with powerful Chef tools to manage and automate your infrastructure
• Address the growing challenges of code management, cloud, and virtualization with Chef quickly
• Explore and implement the important aspects of Chef Automate using this recipe-based guide

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Test your cookbooks with Test Kitchen
• Manage cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf
• Use reporting to keep track of what happens during the execution of chef-client runs across all of the machines
• Create custom Ohai and Knife plugins
• Build a high-availability service using Heartbeat
• Use a HAProxy to load-balance multiple web servers

About the Author

Matthias Marschall is a Software Engineer “made in Germany”. His four children make sure that he feels comfortable in lively environments, and stays in control of chaotic situations. A lean and agile engineering lead, he’s passionate about continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and all things DevOps.

In recent years, Matthias has helped build several web-based businesses, first with Java and then with Ruby on Rails. He quickly grew into system administration, writing his own configuration management tool before migrating his whole infrastructure to Chef in its early days.

In 2008, he started a blog (http://www.agileweboperations.com) together with Dan Ackerson. There, they have shared their ideas about DevOps since the early days of the continually emerging movement. You can find him on Twitter as @mmarschall.

Matthias holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science (Dipl.-Inf. (FH)) and teaches courses on Agile Software Development at the University of Augsburg.

When not writing or coding, Matthias enjoys drawing cartoons and playing Go. He lives near Munich, Germany.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Chef Infrastructure
Chapter 2. Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs
Chapter 3. Chef Language and Style
Chapter 4. Writing Better Cookbooks
Chapter 5. Working with Files and Packages
Chapter 6. Users and Applications
Chapter 7. Servers and Cloud Infrastructure