Chef

Chef is a configuration management tool: you describe the desired state of a machine in Ruby based recipes, group them in cookbooks, and chef-client converges the node towards that state. Chef Workstation bundles the tools you use on your own machine (chef, knife, kitchen, cookstyle, inspec). Nothing here was run: the commands, resources and file layouts come from the Chef documentation and are unverified, so confirm with --help or knife --help on your installed version before relying on a flag. Compare with Ansible, Puppet and Salt.

Documentation: Chef docs Project: chef/chef

Cookbook Layout #

chef CLI (Workstation) #

knife #

knife talks to a Chef Infra Server using config.rb (usually in .chef/ or ~/.chef/) and your API key.

chef-client #

chef-solo is deprecated in favour of local mode (chef-client -z): treat it as legacy.

Recipe Resources #

package 'nginx' do
  action :install
end

template '/etc/nginx/nginx.conf' do
  source 'nginx.conf.erb'
  owner 'root'
  group 'root'
  mode '0644'
  variables(workers: node['nginx']['workers'])
  notifies :reload, 'service[nginx]', :delayed
end

service 'nginx' do
  action [:enable, :start]
end

directory '/var/www/app' do
  owner 'www-data'
  recursive true
end

execute 'build-index' do
  command '/usr/local/bin/build-index'
  creates '/var/lib/app/index.db'
end

Common meta properties: action, only_if, not_if, notifies :action, 'resource[name]', :immediately|:delayed, subscribes. A resource runs in the order written; notifications are queued and, with :delayed, run once at the end of the run.

Attributes #

# attributes/default.rb
default['nginx']['workers'] = 2

node['nginx']['workers'] reads the merged value. Precedence, lowest to highest: default, force_default, normal, override, force_override, automatic. Role, environment and policy levels are also layered into default and override (see the docs for the full table). Prefer default in cookbooks and override in roles or environments.

Data Bags #

Test Kitchen #

Test Kitchen builds a throwaway instance, converges your cookbook on it and runs tests.

# kitchen.yml
driver:
  name: dokken

provisioner:
  name: dokken

verifier:
  name: inspec

platforms:
  - name: ubuntu-24.04
    driver:
      image: dokken/ubuntu-24.04

suites:
  - name: default
    run_list:
      - recipe[COOKBOOK::default]
    verifier:
      inspec_tests:
        - test/integration/default

The dokken driver (container based) needs the kitchen-dokken gem and Docker. Other drivers include vagrant (see Vagrant).

Troubleshooting #

See Also #

• Ansible
• Puppet
• Salt
• Vagrant
• Terraform