Centrally sharing data using a Chef data bag and Hiera with Puppet
Now we have the basics of our LAMP infrastructure up and running, let's secure it a little by creating an htaccess file with a few authorized users in it. To achieve this, we could use different techniques, but the data bag feature in Chef is pretty convenient for our objective. A data bag is simply data in a JSON file stored on the Chef server, that can be searched from the cookbooks. It's especially useful for storing data that need to be accessed globally from a central point (such as users, service credentials, version numbers, URLs, even feature flags, and other similar features depending on your usage).
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 recipes
How to do it…
Our objective is to create two users—John and Mary. Here's a table of the required information...
