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Questions tagged [chef]

Chef is an open source configuration management framework for infrastructure automation.

Chef is an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure. You write source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built, then apply those descriptions to your servers. The result is a fully automated infrastructure: when a new server comes on line, the only thing you have to do is tell Chef what role it should play in your architecture.

More information can be found in the Documentation.

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Best strategy to keep chef cookbooks versions under control

I'm looking for ideas about chef cookbooks versions management. I know that you pin specific versions in the environment, but I'm not sure how to go about it. We use librarian-chef which installs 3rd party community books into the cookbooks folder.…
gansbrest
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Configuration Management overkill for 3 node clusters?

I have 2-3 node clusters for our load balancers and various web applications. I'm having to make the change in QA first, then in staging (on 2-3 servers), then in production (on 2-3) servers. Is a configuration management tool like chef or puppet…
Bradford
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Chef-client not updating a cookbook from the server

I have a chef cookbook (for apache2). It fails to work on one node. So I'm trying to tweak it and update it, but the node doesn't seem to download the new version. I have been able to upload everything to the chef server from my local machine with…
Amandasaurus
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Why use chef-solo on a single instance?

I understand the advantages of using Chef and puppet in a multiserver environment. Its fantastic for enforcing and describing configuration across many servers. But lets say you have a single server, what advantage does chef-solo give you over…
Kyle
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How can I download Maven artifacts in chef?

I want to do something like this in a chef recipe: maven_artifact "/opt/foo/my.jar" do source "com.foo:my:0.1:jar" end But I can't find a cookbook which provides this. I've written something which basically does this but it doesn't handle…
recampbell
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Chef Server vs Chef Solo

I'm putting together a structure to run a Rails application. The application itself runs on Heroku. However, it makes requests to a cluster, which performs the call through a program in C. To be able to recover from crashes faster, I want to create…
João Daniel
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What is the correct way to loop in a Chef (solo) recipe?

Can someone please explain to me how chef works? That is a pretty broad question, so to narrow it down I have this very simple recipe that loops over a list of users and creates each one if they do not already exist. It does not work. From what I…
Matthew J Morrison
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no default value for required attribute

What is the recommended approach for using an attribute in a resource, like a template, when there is no reasonable default for that attribute. The attribute value is expected to be provided at runtime. If it is not, the chef recipe execution…
Sarah Haskins
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Simple Windows+Linux server provisioning? Chef/Puppet/Ansible etc

I'm primarily a developer, part time devops; and manage servers here and there for my projects. I want to automate provisioning of web/app/database servers going forward for my projects I manage a mixture of both Windows and Linux servers (VPS,…
Andrew
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Chef: encrypted data bags, protecting the encryption key

When you are using the encrypted data bag feature for Chef how do you go about deploying the key to many servers? If you put it into a recipe anyone who has access to any of the chef servers or clients can pull the key and potentially decrypt any of…
Kyle
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How do I provide dpkg configuration parameters to aptitude or apt-get?

When installing gitolite I find that: # aptitude install gitolite The following NEW packages will be installed: gitolite 0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 29 not upgraded. Need to get 114 kB of archives. After unpacking 348…
troutwine
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Idiomatic way to invoke chef-solo?

What is the idiomatic way to invoke chef-solo? Most sites do this: chef-solo -c ~/solo.rb -j ~/node.json -r http://www.example.com/chef-solo.tar.gz But that's long. There are a few shorter ways to do this that I can think of: A rake task (rake…
kerkeslager
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Does chef-client use a local cache? If so, can I clear it?

This might be a stupid question. I don't know a lot about chef. I am using chef 11.8.2 on a node. I have a weird problem which might be caused by the chef client caching things rather than downloading from the chef server. Does chef do this? Cache…
Amandasaurus
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debugging chef recipes on opsworks instances - access to custom json / data bag attributes

I'd like to use a chef-shell session on an aws opsworks ec2 server so I can test some environment and instance specific code I'd like to include in a custom recipe. For example, I'd like to see the output of instance attributes such as…
Peter M
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Service doesn't start when using chef

I've written a script which I trigger as a service. When I call service myservice start the service starts fine. However, when the same service is triggered using chef, the service doesnt start. My chef service code looks like this service…
Jay
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