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Mastering Chef
Mastering Chef

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

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Mastering Chef

Chapter 2. Knife and Its Associated Plugins

We learned about the Chef ecosystem in the last chapter and, as we saw, Knife is one of those tools that we'll be using the most while doing development. In this chapter, we'll look at the internals of Knife and we'll also see different plugins, which will make your life a lot easier while managing your infrastructure using Chef.

Introducing Knife

Knife is a command-line tool that comes bundled with the Chef installation. Depending upon how Chef was installed, you may find the binary at any particular location on your workstation. Since I have installed Chef using rvm and gem packaging, it is found at ~/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.0/gems/chef-11.8.2/bin/knife.

Depending upon your setup, you may find it at some other location. Whatever the location, ensure that it is in your PATH variable.

Knife is used for almost every aspect of managing your interactions with chef-server. It helps us manage:

  • Cookbooks
  • Environments
  • Roles
  • Data bags
  • Nodes
  • API clients
  • Bootstrapping of instances
  • Searching for nodes

Let's see what the knife command has to offer to us. Just fire up the terminal and enter the command:

$knife
ERROR: You need to pass a sub-command (e.g., knife SUB-COMMAND)
Usage: knife sub-command (options)
    -s, --server-url URL             Chef Server URL
        --chef-zero-port PORT        Port to start chef-zero on
    -k, --key...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about one of the most widely used components of Chef's ecosystem, called Knife. We looked at the different subcommands of Knife, configuring Knife, and finally some plugins that can be used to extend Knife's functionality.

In the next chapter, we will see why we need to learn Ruby and write efficient infrastructure code using Ruby.

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Description

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.

Who is this book 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

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jun 29, 2015
Length: 374 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781783981564
Vendor :
Chef
Languages :
Tools :

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Product Details

Publication date : Jun 29, 2015
Length: 374 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781783981564
Vendor :
Chef
Languages :
Tools :

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Frequently bought together


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Total 73.98
Mastering Chef
€36.99
Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition
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Total 73.98 Stars icon

Table of Contents

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

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2.5
(4 Ratings)
5 star 0%
4 star 25%
3 star 25%
2 star 25%
1 star 25%
jeevan dongre Sep 08, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Mr.Mayank Joshi has done a brilliant job.I suggest this to all the beginners and also experts who are working on chef or keen to take up a career on chef configuration management tool. Everything is patiently written, focused on even the small details of the platform.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amazon Customer May 23, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
The book is a good introduction for Chef.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Jason and Ashley Morgan Jan 22, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
I'm still in the process of reading it so obviously I'll need to post an update when I either finish or give up. This is nowhere near well written and the author seems to jump around and assume the reader already has a deep understanding of chef. This is my second chef book, I've done multiple training sessions, and I'm responsible for maintaining chef and writing recipes for my production environment. I bought this book to give me a deep dive into chef. I think that's what it's providing but it's hard to tell. The author jumps around rapidly and continually references portions of the product that he hasn't covered yet.I'm still holding out hope that decyphering the authors intent will get me to a much deeper understanding of chef but I haven't found it helpful so far. This is definitely not for beginners. That all being said the author clearly understands chef and I've already come across multiple explanations that gave me insight into aspects of chef that I didn't understand before. It's just really frustrating trying to dig them out of the poorly written and scattered text.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Manuel García del Ojo Jul 25, 2015
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
I am very disapointed with this book. I expected a walkthrough explaining how to build a project in the first chapters but the only thing it explains is the chef resources, elements and so on...To sum up, if you already know to how start a project is the right book for you, but not if you are a beginner with chef like me.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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