Learning Chef: A Guide to Configuration Management and Automation

Get a hands-on introduction to the Chef, the configuration management tool for solving operations issues in enterprises large and small. Ideal for developers and sysadmins new to configuration management, this guide shows you to automate the packaging and delivery of applications in your infrastructure. You’ll be able to build (or rebuild) your infrastructure’s application stack in minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks.

After teaching you how to write Ruby-based Chef code, this book walks you through different Chef tools and configuration management concepts in each chapter, using detailed examples throughout. All you need to get started is command-line experience and familiarity with basic system administration.

• Configure your Chef development environment and start writing recipes
• Create Chef cookbooks with recipes for each part of your infrastructure
• Use Test Kitchen to manage sandbox testing environments
• Manage single nodes with Chef client, and multiple nodes with Chef Server
• Use data bags for storing shared global data between nodes
• Simulate production Chef Server environments with Chef Zero
• Classify different types of services in your infrastructure with roles
• Model life stages of your application, including development, testing, staging, and production

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Configuration Management and Chef
Chapter 2. Configure Your Chef Development Environment
Chapter 3. Ruby and Chef Syntax
Chapter 4. Write Your First Chef Recipe
Chapter 5. Manage Sandbox Environments with Test Kitchen
Chapter 6. Manage Nodes with Chef Client
Chapter 7. Cookbook Authoring and Use
Chapter 8. Attributes
Chapter 9. Manage Multiple Nodes at Once with Chef Server
Chapter 10. Community and the Chef-Client Cookbook
Chapter 11. Chef Zero
Chapter 12. Search
Chapter 13. Data Bags
Chapter 14. Roles
Chapter 15. Environments
Chapter 16. Testing
Chapter 17. Conclusion

Appendix A. Open Source Chef Server
Appendix B. Hosted Enterprise Chef