Exploring Knife

In a Chef infrastructure, Knife runs from the command line and interacts between the Chef server and chef-client. It helps manage cookbooks, nodes, roles, and so on.

As we are working with Chef-Solo, we will use Knife to initialize and download our cookbooks. In an enterprise Chef environment, Knife comes with many handy commands and can be used for managing different nodes and uploading cookbooks, data bags, roles, and much more. A complete list of Knife commands can be found at http://docs.opscode.com/.

Also, Chef provides chef-dk, which includes all the necessary packages you need to get started with Chef. It includes Berkshelf 3.0 and Test Kitchen (an integration testing framework).

There are no extra steps involved in the installation of Knife. Knife is a part of Chef server and gets installed with Chef. As we have already installed Chef on our machine, let's confirm the installation of Knife using the following command:

$ knife –v

The preceding command will...