Managing services

We've seen how to install system packages using the package resource. In this section, you'll discover how to manage system services, using a resource named service. We'll continue to build the LAMP server we started in the previous section by managing the Apache HTTP and MariaDB services right from Chef. This way we'll be able to manage any available service.

Getting ready

To work through this recipe, you will need the following:

• A working Chef DK installation on the workstation

• A working Chef client configuration on the remote host

• The Chef code from the previous recipe

How to do it…

The structure of the service resource is very similar to the package resource. We want to do two actions with our services: enable them at boot and start them right away. This translates into a simple Chef resource with an array of actions:

service "service_name" do
  action [:enable, :start]
end

Enabling and starting Apache service

Add this service resource to the apache/recipes/default.rb file, just...