Chef Development Kit

Chef Development Kit (Chef DK) brings Chef and the development tools developed by the Chef Community together and acts as the consistent interface to this awesomeness. This awesomeness is composed of:

• Chef
• Berkshelf
• Test Kitchen
• ChefSpec
• Foodcritic

This repository contains the code for the chef command. The full package is built via the 'chefdk' project in omnibus-chef.

Installation

You can get the latest release of ChefDK from our downloads page.

On Mac OS X, you can also use homebrew-cask to install ChefDK.

Once you install the package, the chef-client suite, berks, kitchen, and this application (chef) will be symlinked into your system bin directory, ready to use.

Usage

For help with Berkshelf, Test Kitchen, ChefSpec or FoodCritic, visit those projects' homepages for documentation and guides. For help with chef-client and knife, visit the Chef documentation and Learn Chef.

The chef Command

Our goal is for chef to become a workflow tool that builds on the ideas of Berkshelf to provide an awesome experience that encourages quick iteration and testing (and makes those things easy) and provides a way to easily, reliably, and repeatably roll out new automation code to your infrastructure.

While we've got a long way to go before we reach that goal we do have some helpful bits of functionality already included in the chef command:

chef generate

The generate subcommand generates skeleton Chef code layouts so you can skip repetitive boilerplate and get down to automating your infrastructure quickly. Unlike other generators, it only generates the minimum required files when creating a cookbook so you can focus on the task at hand without getting overwhelmed by stuff you don't need.

The following generators are built-in:

• chef generate app Creates an "application" layout that supports multiple cookbooks. This is a somewhat experimental compromise between the one-repo-per-cookbook and monolithic-chef-repo styles of cookbook management.

• chef generate cookbook Creates a single cookbook.

• chef generate recipe Creates a new recipe file in an existing cookbook.

• chef generate attribute Creates a new attributes file in an existing cookbook.

• chef generate template Creates a new template file in an existing cookbook. Use the -s SOURCE option to copy a source file's content to populate the template.

• chef generate file Creates a new cookbook file in an existing cookbook. Supports the -s SOURCE option similar to template.

• chef generate lwrp Creates a new LWRP resource and provider in an existing cookbook.

chef gem

chef gem is a wrapper command that manages installation and updating of rubygems for the Ruby installation embedded in the ChefDK package. This allows you to install knife plugins, Test Kitchen drivers, and other Ruby applications that are not packaged with ChefDK.

Gems are installed to a .chefdk directory in your home directory; any executables included with a gem you install will be created in ~/.chefdk/gem/ruby/2.1.0/bin, so add this to your PATH if you plan to use executables installed this way.

chef verify

chef verify tests the embedded applications. By default it runs a quick "smoke test" to verify that the embedded applications are installed correctly and can run basic commands. As an end user this is probably all you'll ever need, but verify can also optionally run unit and integration tests by supplying the --unit and --integration flags, respectively.

WARNING: The integration tests will do dangerous things like start HTTP servers with access to your filesystem and even create users and groups if run with sufficient privileges. The tests may also be sensitive to your machine's configuration. If you choose to run these, we recommend to only run them on dedicated, isolated hosts (we do this in our build cluster to verify each build).

chef exec

chef exec <command> runs any arbitrary shell command with the PATH environment variable and the ruby environment variables (GEM_HOME, GEM_PATH, etc) setup to point at the embedded ChefDK omnibus environment.

Using ChefDK as Your Primary Development Environment

By default, ChefDK only adds a few select applications to your PATH and packages them in such a way that they are isolated from any other Ruby development tools you have on your system. If you're happily using your system ruby, rvm, rbenv, chruby or any other development environment, you can continue to do so. Just ensure that the ChefDK provided applications appear first in your PATH before any gem-installed versions and you're good to go.

If you'd like to use ChefDK as your primary Ruby/Chef development environment, however, you can do so by making a few modifications to your environment:

• Add /opt/chefdk/embedded/bin to your PATH. This gives you access to ChefDK's embedded ruby and support applications.
• Add ~/.chefdk/gem/ruby/2.1.0/bin to your PATH. This will allow you to run any command line applications you install via chef gem.