Creating a free hosted server Chef account and a Puppet server

In the preferred Chef client/server mode, we need a Chef server to centralize all the information and action. We can build our own, either for testing purposes or for production use (with the maintenance overhead that goes with it), or we can use Hosted Chef, the Chef server hosted by the company who wrote Chef. You'll learn here how to create a free Hosted Chef account, so we can start coding with Chef as soon as possible and not worry about the server part. After this first step, we'll download the Chef Start Kit, an archive containing a fully working Chef repository, with a sample role and cookbook we can use right away—and that's what we'll do by sending this sample cookbook to the server using our first knife command.

Note

Remember: knife is the command to use from the developer's workstation to manipulate information and resources on the Chef server. The knife command is never used on a Chef node.

Getting ready

To work through...