Objective

Learn to use chef. I used the tutorial here. Play list of all videos here.

Pre-Requisites

• Registered accounts at opscode and github

• vagrant installed. Refer to documentation

• Install rbenv - brew install rbenv ruby-build

• Add rbenv to path - echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bash_profile && source ~/.bash_profile

• Install ruby and chef

    rbenv rehash
    rbenv install 1.9.3-p385
    rbenv shell 1.9.3-p385
    rbenv global 1.9.3-p385
    gem install chef
    rbenv rehash
  

Notes

These are some notes I made based on the videos:

Converge a VM node using Hosted Chef (Videos 1 - 18)

• Configure Knife
  • The way it does that is via 3 files knife.rb, app-validator.pem and username.pem.
  • knife looks for these 3 files in these locations - .chef/ in your project directory or in your home or /etc/chef
• Update Vagrantfile to include chef_client, locations to keys and node name
• vagrant up - you will see the node get registered on opscode.com
• Now you need to get cookbooks
  • Can use knife to download - knife cookbook site download apt
  • Extract and move to cookbooks - tar xzvf apt*.tar.gz -C cookbooks && rm apt*.tar.gz
  • Upload cookbook - knife cookbook upload apt
  • Upload multiple cookbooks - knife cookbook upload -a
• Go to opscode.com and select the recipes you want to the runlist
  • the video tells you to drag omnibus-updater but the new cookbook does now work with chef 10.x. I added config.omnibus.chef_version = :latest to my Vagrantfile to get the latest chef
• vagrant provision
• Can also use knife to add a recipe to the run list - knife node edit ubuntu
• Install mongodb and other cookbooks. The video talks about adding the default mongodb recipe, but that didn't work as I kept getting "recipe compile error". I used recipe[mongodb::10gen_repo] instead. It also said 'Ruby development headers... not found' when installing apache, but the webserver itself was up and running.
• Note - To better manage cookbooks checkout berkshelf
• vagrant provision to converge the node

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Create a cookbook (Video 19 to 20.5)

Skipping this section; created saj_cookbook but delete all other cookbooks; kept just apt, mongo and nginx

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Roles (Video 20.5)

• Objective is to create a multi node environment
  • base node - for runlists that are common across servers - knife role create base
    • add recipe[apt] here
  • now knife node edit ubuntu, remove recipe[apt] here and add role[base] instead
  • this has to be added to our code base. so:
    • mkdir roles
    • knife role show base -Fj > roles/base.json
  • to create a role and upload via knife:
    • first add a role like database.json
    • knife role from file roles/database.json
    • now we can add this to runlist like so - knife node run_list add ubuntu "role[database]"

Managing cookbooks using Berkshelf

• Manually downloading cookbooks was getting painful; enter Berkshelf:
  • Configure berkshelf - berks configure --force
  • If there are SSL errors, edit ~/.berkshelf/config.json and set ssl verify to false, like it is shown here
  • Install cookbooks - berks install --path cookbooks/
  • vagrant up