Mastering Chef

Build, deploy, and manage your IT infrastructure to deliver a successful automated system with Chef in any environment

About This Book

• Discover the new fundamentals of the ecosystem, its APIs, as well as the ohai and knife plugins
• Learn new ways of using Chef and its attributes by overriding the old attributes
• Packed with real-world examples that can be used to explore the components like speeding up Chef with Ruby

Who This Book Is For

If you have used Chef before and are interested in automation of infrastructure and want to develop your own tools to manage large-scale infrastructures, then this book is for you.

What You Will Learn

• Get familiar with the Chef ecosystem and its associated components
• Use Ruby and Chef together to write effective infrastructure code
• Explore various aspects of the Chef API, such as using search in a recipe and with the help of the Knife plugin
• Write recipes and custom Lightweight Resource/Provider
• Discover the usage of data bags and templates to customize servers
• Extend the functionalities of Chef using custom Ohai and Knife plugins

In Detail

Chef is a configuration management tool that turns IT infrastructure into code. Chef provides tools to manage systems at scale. This book will take you through the Chef code, tools, and components to manage your environments using the Chef server efficiently. The book starts with an introduction to the Chef ecosystem, taking you through the terminologies used in Chef, the anatomy of a chef-client run, and Chef solo. You will learn how to use Knife and its associated plugins to accomplish daily routine tasks in a more efficient way. You will also learn how to speed this up by using Ruby with Chef, which will allow you to write more efficient infrastructure code. This book then introduces you to cookbooks and how to extend chef-client through the use of Lightweight Resource/Provider. It tells you how to keep all kind of configurations in key-value pair efficiently, by introducing you to data bags and templates. Then you will get a walkthrough of Chef’s wonderful APIs and the extended functionalities of Chef. By the end of the book you will be so well-versed with Chef that you’ll be able to explore some fun uses of Chef, which will allow for better productivity.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction to the Chef Ecosystem
Chapter 2. Knife and Its Associated Plugins
Chapter 3. Chef and Ruby
Chapter 4. Controlling Access to Resources
Chapter 5. Starting the Journey to the World of Recipes
Chapter 6. Cookbooks and LWRPs
Chapter 7. Roles and Environments
Chapter 8. Attributes and Their Uses
Chapter 9. Ohai and Its Plugin Ecosystem
Chapter 10. Data Bags and Templates
Chapter 11. Chef API and Search
Chapter 12. Extending Chef
Chapter 13. Using Chef