Chef Bootstrapping Scripts

Some simple scripts to get started using Chef.

Bootstrapping a server on AWS EC2

Use the chef-server/chef-server.init script as user data when starting an AWS EC2 instance, to bootstrap a chef server.

The script will perform the steps described in Package Installation on Debian and Ubuntu and should therefore be used with an Ubuntu AMI with a recent version of the cloud-init package. For more information on `cloud-init' see its Documentation.

Also, a hostname alias for 127.0.0.1 named "chef" will be created, and the chef server URL will be http://chef:4000/. When you bootstrap clients, they should create an alias in /etc/hosts to map the IP address of the chef server instance to the hostname "chef".

Lastly, the chef-server-create-admin.sh script will be downloaded and executed to create an admin "client" on the chef server as described in Configure the Command Line Client.

After the installation, the chef server web UI will run on port 4040, with an administrative user "admin" and a password "chef".

# download the cloud-init file to be used as instance user data
$ ubuntu@ubuntu11-vm:~$ wget -O chef-server.init https://raw.github.com/CoreMedia/chef-bootstrap/master/chef-server/chef-server.init

# start up a new instance using chef-server.init as the user data file
$ ec2-run-instances ami-359ea941 --instance-type m1.small --region ${EC2_REGION} --key ${EC2_KEYPAIR} --user-data-file chef-server.init

# find the public host name of your new instance
$ ec2-describe-instances --region {EC2_REGION}

# log in to your new instance (this assumes the security group allows inbound traffic on port 22)
# chef-server port 4000 and chef-server-webui port 4040 will be forwarded from your local ports 4000 and 4040
$ ssh -i ${EC2_SSH_KEY} -L 4000:chef:4000 -L 4040:chef:4040 ec2-46-137-66-25.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

The cloud-init is redirected to /var/log/cloud-init.log.

Feel free to fork this repo, make your own changes, and use the scripts in whatever way you like, but do not forget to change the URL to the chef-server-create-admin.sh script in chef-server.init.

Compatibility

The script has been tested with the Ubuntu 11.04 (natty) release AMI ami-359ea941 and chef 0.10.0-1.

Known Issues

chef-server-webui fails to start automatically

The installation script of the chef-server package attempts to start the chef-server and chef-server-webui sevices. Apparently, there is a problem with starting the chef-server-webui service, because it often fails. In this case there will be no log file /var/log/chef/server-webui.log.

As a workaround:

• make sure the chef-server-webui service is stopped: sudo /etc/init.d/chef-server-webui stop
• start the web UI process manually (it will log to the console, not the log file): sudo /usr/sbin/chef-server-webui
• when the process is up ("Successfully bound to port 4040"), stop it with Ctrl-C
• start the chef-server-webui service: sudo /etc/init.d/chef-server-webui start

The service should start now and log to /var/log/chef/server-webui.log.

chef-server-webui does not use the configured default admin password

It happens that the web UI does not use admin password configured in the cloud-init script ("chef", this will be written to /etc/chef/webui.rb), but the default "p@ssw0rd1". If you cannot login as admin/chef, try admin/p@ssw0rd1.

"Tampered with cookie" message when opening the chef web UI

The chef web UI signs its cookies. When you create a completely new chef installation (e.g. by using this script), it will create a new session signing key. If you have visited a previous chef installation under the same URL (http://chef:4040/) before, your browser might still have cookies signed with the old key, which will lead to this message. As a workaround, delete those cookies from your browser cache.