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Mastering Chef

You're reading from   Mastering Chef Build, deploy, and manage your IT infrastructure to deliver a successful automated system with Chef in any environment

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2015
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781783981564
Length 374 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Mayank Joshi Mayank Joshi
Author Profile Icon Mayank Joshi
Mayank Joshi
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Toc

Table of Contents (15) Chapters Close

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

Data bags

A data bag is a global variable that's stored as JSON data and is accessible from a Chef server or chef-solo. A Chef server indexes a data bag, and hence it can be searched using Chef API. Recipes can also search a data bag and access its items.

A data bag has the following structure:

{
  "id": "item_name",
   "key_1": "value_1",
    . . .
    "key_n": "value_n"
}

Before an item can be uploaded to a data bag, a directory structure needs to be put in place to store the JSON files. In chef-repo, create a directory structure as follows:

chef-repo
|-- cookbooks
|-- data_bags
|-- environments
'-- roles

All the data bags will get stored in the data_bags directory. Let's say we've a data bag called users that will be used to store information such as the name, SSH key, and home directory of different users. This will require us to create a directory structure as follows:

chef-repo/data_bags
|-- users

All the...

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