Using chef-shell

While writing cookbooks, being able to try out parts of a recipe interactively and using breakpoints helps you to understand how your recipes work.

Chef comes with chef-shell, which is essentially an interactive Ruby session with Chef. In chef-shell, you can create attributes, write recipes, and initialize Chef runs, among other things. Chef-shell allows you to evaluate parts of your recipes on-the-fly before uploading them to your Chef server.

How to do it…

Running chef-shell is straightforward:

1. Start chef-shell in standalone mode:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ chef-shell
   loading configuration: none (standalone chef-shell session)
   Session type: standalone
   Loading......done.
   
   This is the chef-shell.
    Chef Version: 12.14.89
    http://www.chef.io/
    http://docs.chef.io/
   
   run `help' for help, `exit' or ^D to quit.
   
   Ohai2u mma@laptop!
   chef (12.14.89)>
   

2. Switch to the attributes mode in chef-shell:

   chef (12.14.89)> attributes_mode
   

3. Set an attribute value to be used inside the recipe later...