Chef is a configuration management and automation tool for information technology professionals that configures and manages your infrastructure whether it is on-premises or in the cloud. It can be used to speed up application deployment and to coordinate the work of multiple system administrators and developers involving hundreds, or even thousands, of servers and applications to support a large customer base. The key to Chef’s power is that it turns infrastructure into code. Once you master Chef, you will be able to enable web IT with first class support for managing your cloud infrastructure with an easy automation of your internal deployments or end users systems.
Here are the major components of Chef that we are going to setup and configure in this tutorial.
<tdwidth="220"><strong>Chef Development Kit</strong></td>
<tdwidth="492">Version 0.6.2</td>
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<tdwidth="220"><strong>RAM and CPU</strong></td>
<tdwidth="492">4 GB , 2.0+2.0 GHZ</td>
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### Chef Server's Installation and Configurations ###
Chef Server is central core component that stores recipes as well as other configuration data and interact with the workstations and nodes. let's download the installation media by selecting the latest version of chef server from its official web link.
We will get its installation package and install it by using following commands.
Now Run the following command to start all of the chef server services ,this step may take a few minutes to complete as its composed of many different services that work together to create a functioning system.
The chef server startup command 'chef-server-ctl reconfigure' needs to be run twice so that installation ends with the following completion output.
Chef Client finished, 342/350 resources updated in 113.71139964 seconds
opscode Reconfigured!
**4) Reboot OS**
Once the installation complete reboot the operating system for the best working without doing this we you might get the following SSL_connect error during creation of User.
ERROR: Errno::ECONNRESET: Connection reset by peer - SSL_connect
**5) Create new Admin User**
Run the following command to create a new administrator user with its profile settings. During its creation user’s RSA private key is generated automatically that should be saved to a safe location. The --filename option will save the RSA private key to a specified path.
Chef Manage is a management console for Enterprise Chef that enables a web-based user interface for visualizing and managing nodes, data bags, roles, environments, cookbooks and role-based access control (RBAC).
**1) Downloading Chef Manage**
Copy the link for Chef Manage from the official web site and download the chef manage package.
You would be asked to create new organization or accept the invitation from the organizations. Let's create a new organization by providing its short and full name as shown.
We can also create new Organization from the command line by executing the following command.
root@ubuntu-14-chef:~# chef-server-ctl org-create linux Linoxide Linux Org. --association_user kashi --filename linux.pem
### Configuration and setup of Workstation ###
As we had done with successful installation of chef server now we are going to setup its workstation to create and configure any recipes, cookbooks, attributes, and other changes that we want to made to our Chef configurations.
**1) Create New User and Organization on Chef Server**
In order to setup workstation we create a new user and an organization for this from the command line.
### Chef Development Kit Setup for Workstation ###
Chef Development Kit is a software package suite with all the development tools need to code Chef. It combines with the best of the breed tools developed by Chef community with Chef Client.
**1) Downloading Chef DK**
We can Download chef development kit from its official web link and choose the required operating system to get its chef development tool kit.
Create "~/cookbooks" folder for cookbooks as specified knife.rb file.
root@ubuntu-15-WKS:/# mkdir cookbooks
**Testing with Knife Configurations**
Run "knife user list" and "knife client list" commands to verify whether knife configuration is working.
root@ubuntu-15-WKS:/.chef# knife user list
You might get the following error while first time you run this command.This occurs because we do not have our Chef server's SSL certificate on our workstation.
ERROR: SSL Validation failure connecting to host: 172.25.10.173 - SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate verify failed
ERROR: Could not establish a secure connection to the server.
Use `knife ssl check` to troubleshoot your SSL configuration.
If your Chef Server uses a self-signed certificate, you can use
`knife ssl fetch` to make knife trust the server's certificates.
To recover from the above error run the following command to fetch ssl certs and once again run the knife user and client list command and it should be fine then.
root@ubuntu-15-WKS:/.chef# knife ssl fetch
WARNING: Certificates from 172.25.10.173 will be fetched and placed in your trusted_cert
directory (/.chef/trusted_certs).
Knife has no means to verify these are the correct certificates. You should
verify the authenticity of these certificates after downloading.
Adding certificate for ubuntu-14-chef.test.com in /.chef/trusted_certs/ubuntu-14-chef_test_com.crt
Now after fetching ssl certs with above command, let's again run the below command.
root@ubuntu-15-WKS:/.chef#knife client list
kashi-linux
### New Node Configuration to interact with chef-server ###
Nodes contain chef-client which performs all the infrastructure automation. So, Its time to begin with adding new servers to our chef environment by Configuring a new node to interact with chef-server after we had Configured chef-server and knife workstation combinations.
To configure a new node to work with chef server use below command.
172.25.10.170 to file /tmp/install.sh.26024/metadata.txt
172.25.10.170 trying wget...
After all we can see the vewly created node under the knife node list and new client list as it it will also creates a new client with the node.
root@ubuntu-15-WKS:~# knife node list
mydns
Similarly we can add multiple number of nodes to our chef infrastructure by providing ssh credentials with the same above knofe bootstrap command.
### Conclusion ###
In this detailed article we learnt about the Chef Configuration Management tool with its basic understanding and overview of its components with installation and configuration settings. We hope you have enjoyed learning the installation and configuration of Chef server with its workstation and client nodes.
