Using the hosted Chef platform

If you want to get started with Chef right away (without the need to install your own Chef server) or want a third party to give you a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for your Chef server, you can sign up for hosted Chef by Chef Software, Inc. Chef Software, Inc. operates Chef as a cloud service. It's quick to set up and gives you full control, using users and groups to control access permissions to your Chef setup. We'll configure knife, Chef's command-line tool, to interact with hosted Chef, so that you can start managing your nodes.

Getting ready

Before being able to use hosted Chef, you need to sign up for the service. There is a free account for up to five nodes.

Visit http://manage.chef.io/signup and register for a free account.

I registered as the user webops with an organization short name of awo. An organization is the top-level entity for role-based access control in the Chef server.

After registering your account, it is time to prepare your organization to be used with your chef-repo repository.

How to do it…

Carry out the following steps to interact with the hosted Chef:

1. Create the configuration directory for your Chef client on your local workstation:

   mma@laptop:~ $ cd ~/chef-repo
    mkdir .chef
   

2. Generate the knife config and put the downloaded knife.rb into the .chef directory inside your chef-repo directory. Make sure you have your user's private key saved as .chef/<YOUR USERNAME>.pem, (in my case it is .chef/webops.pem). If needed, you can reset it at https://id.chef.io/id/profile. Replace webops with the username you chose for hosted Chef, and awo with the short name you chose for your organization in your knife.rb file:

   current_dir = File.dirname(__FILE__)
   log_level                :info
   log_location             STDOUT
   node_name                "webops"
   client_key               "#{current_dir}/webops.pem"
   chef_server_url          "https://api.chef.io/organizations/awo"
   cache_type               'BasicFile'
   cache_options( :path => "#{ENV['HOME']}/.chef/checksums" )
   cookbook_path            ["#{current_dir}/../cookbooks"]

   Note

   You should add the following code to your .gitingore file inside chef-repo to avoid your credentials ending up in your Git repository:

   .chef/*.pem
   

3. Use knife to verify that you can connect to your hosted Chef organization. It should not have any clients, so far:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife client list
   

How it works…

The following line of code in your knife.rb file tells knife where to find your user's private key. It is used to authenticate you with the Chef server:

client_key               "#{current_dir}/webops.pem"

Also, the following line of code in your knife.rb file tells knife that you are using hosted Chef. You will find your organization name as the last part of the URL:

chef_server_url          "https://api.chef.io/organizations/awo"

Using the knife.rb file and your user's key, you can now connect to your organization hosted by Chef Software, Inc.

There's more…

This setup is good for you if you do not want to worry about running, scaling, and updating your own Chef server and if you're happy with saving all your configuration data in the Cloud (under the control of Chef Software, Inc.).

Note

If you need to have all your configuration data within your own network boundaries, you can install Chef server on premises by choosing ON PREMISES CHEF at https://www.chef.io/chef/choose-your-version/ or install the Open Source version of Chef server directly from GitHub at https://github.com/chef/chef.

See also

• Learn more about the various Chef products at https://www.chef.io/chef/
• You can find the source code for the Chef server on GitHub at https://github.com/chef/chef