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Configuration Management with Chef-Solo
Configuration Management with Chef-Solo

Configuration Management with Chef-Solo: A comprehensive guide to get you up and running with Chef-Solo.

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Configuration Management with Chef-Solo

Chapter 2. Setting Up an Environment for Chef-Solo

We have already discussed some brief theory about Chef-Solo in the previous chapter, but we can't get anywhere until we've installed Chef-Solo and have had a hands-on experience with Chef.

This chapter will guide you with a step-by-step installation of Chef-Solo. We need some additional packages to get it working. Also, we will have a look into the configurations to get it working.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Installation on Linux and Ubuntu
  • Prerequisites of Chef-Solo
  • Chef-Solo cookbook
  • Configurations
  • Downloading a few sample cookbooks
  • Execution of the recipes

Installation on Linux and Ubuntu

Chef provides us with a number of ways to get started. We can get it working using different methods. Each method has certain advantages and disadvantages. Chef-Solo can be installed as a Ruby gem, or a Debian package and is not available as Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) packages for Red Hat based Linux.

The detailed installation methods are discussed in the following sections.

Installing Chef as a Ruby gem

Chef is written in Ruby, and before getting started with Chef-Solo, we have to install Ruby. The installation is simple enough and it requires only two packages to get started. Ruby developers may prefer this particular method to get started.

apt-get install Ruby1.9.3 Ruby1.9.3-dev build-essential

This will install Ruby Version 1.9.1 and also a few required extensions. After installation of Ruby, we can easily install Chef using it as a Ruby gem. We can install Ruby by using the following snippet:

gem1.9.3 install --no-ri --no-rdoc chef

Also, you can install...

Prerequisites of Chef-Solo

We already discussed about installation setups for Chef-Solo. If you are using the Omnibus method, you don't need to worry about any dependencies. However, for installation as a Ruby gem or package management, please ensure that the following packages are installed on your machine.

Use the following command to install the required packages:

$ sudo apt-get install Ruby1.9.3 build-essential

For Omnibus, make sure curl is installed on your machine:

$ sudo apt-get install curl

Tip

curl is a command-line tool for transferring data with URL syntax. It supports various protocols including HTTP, FTP, and FTPS.

Some dependencies for Berkshelf are as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev libxml2-dev openssl zlib1g

To ensure that Chef-Solo installs correctly, go to the terminal and write the following command:

$ chef-solo -v

The preceding command will display the Chef version as shown in the following screenshot:

Prerequisites of Chef-Solo

Cookbooks

Cookbooks are a collection of recipes and they consist of basic and fundamental units of various policies and distributions. Each cookbook contains complete setups to install every distribution on a machine.

For instance, we need a web server, so we are installing Nginx to act as a web server. The Nginx cookbook should contain all the package names that are dependent to install Nginx. Moreover, it should provide step-by-step instructions to the machine to make this happen.

Let's have a detailed look at how to develop a cookbook.

The folder structure

Cookbooks should ideally consist of the following folder structure. As they are a collection of different recipes, while executing the recipe by default, Chef-Solo will look for a default folder:

attributes
    default.rb
files
    default
        file.txt
recipes
    default.rb
templates
    default
        file.erb
metadata.rb

Attributes

As we have already discussed about these terminologies in the last chapter here, once again, we...

Downloading recipes

Let's download a few recipes on a test environment and execute them with Chef-Solo.

First, we'll make a folder named cookbooks and download the Nginx recipe to execute. As we have already installed Chef-Solo in our working environment, use the following command to create a folder named cookbooks:

$ mkdir cookbooks && cd cookbooks
$ git clone https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/nginx

Git provides two methods to download repositories to a local storage. We can use Git and/or https protocol to clone the repository. Our main objective is to place cookbooks under the cookbooks directory.

Chef-Solo configuration

After having downloaded a few recipes, we want to run those recipes and make the system ready. The solo.rb file is used to specify all the configuration details. Its default configuration is loaded every time. By a default configuration, the file exists at /etc/chef/solo.rb, but we can use it with a custom path. The solo.rb file can contain several settings but mainly it is used for the cookbook's path, data bag's path, environment, environment path, log_location, and so on.

You can read all the detailed information about each configuration at www.getchef.com.

Our solo.rb file is pretty simple and contains only a few settings.

Create a new solo.rb file with the following content:

file_cache_path    "/var/chef/cache"
file_backup_path   "/var/chef/backup"
cookbook_path ["/home/<username>/cookbooks"]
# An alternative and more useable method is to use ruby code to get directory path
      cookbook_path File.expand_path(&apos...

Installation on Linux and Ubuntu


Chef provides us with a number of ways to get started. We can get it working using different methods. Each method has certain advantages and disadvantages. Chef-Solo can be installed as a Ruby gem, or a Debian package and is not available as Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) packages for Red Hat based Linux.

The detailed installation methods are discussed in the following sections.

Installing Chef as a Ruby gem

Chef is written in Ruby, and before getting started with Chef-Solo, we have to install Ruby. The installation is simple enough and it requires only two packages to get started. Ruby developers may prefer this particular method to get started.

apt-get install Ruby1.9.3 Ruby1.9.3-dev build-essential

This will install Ruby Version 1.9.1 and also a few required extensions. After installation of Ruby, we can easily install Chef using it as a Ruby gem. We can install Ruby by using the following snippet:

gem1.9.3 install --no-ri --no-rdoc chef

Also, you can install...

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Description

This is a step-by-step guide, full of hands-on examples of real-world deployment tasks. Each topic is explained and placed in context, while also pointing out the key details of the concepts used. This book is aimed at system administrators and system engineers who have an understanding of configuration management tools and infrastructure. For novice administrators, it contains easy-to-use application recipes to get started immediately.

What you will learn

  • Define your infrastructure as code in Chef
  • Set up a testing and production environment with ChefSolo
  • Test the incremental development of a project with Vagrant
  • Develop recipes and manage web and database roles
  • Automate tedious manual tasks
  • Learn to use data bags and write clean cookbooks
  • Create a Docker image using cookbooks
  • Manage and scale your cloud infrastructure by automating your configuration management

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jun 25, 2014
Length: 116 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781783982462
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Product Details

Publication date : Jun 25, 2014
Length: 116 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781783982462
Languages :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

7 Chapters
1. Introduction to Chef and Chef-Solo Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Setting Up an Environment for Chef-Solo Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Setting Up a Development Environment Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Developing Cookbooks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. More about Cookbooks and Recipes Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Chef-Solo and Docker Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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DEBRAJ M. Jul 13, 2018
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