Chapter 4. Installing and Configuring Chef

	"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
	-- Abraham Lincoln

We are going to see how Chef is useful in end-to-end automation of the application delivery lifecycle. Let's revisit the context. We want to create an end-to-end pipeline where the application source files are compiled, unit tests are executed, package file is created, a new virtual machine created, runtime environment is setup, and deployment is performed. Chef in our context plays a vital role, considering its many uses. We are going to use it for setting up our runtime environment and standardizing the process of configuration management rather than implementing a customized way to install tools using scripts. Centralized configuration management makes it easy to control and configure resources without complication.

This chapter describes in detail the configuration management tool Chef, the...