How-To setup Chef to manage your servers.

This tutorial will assist you in setting up a Chef Server - hosted at Chef.io , Chef Workstation & Chef Nodes running on AWS as EC2 Instances.

Hosted Chef Server Preparation

• Create account in chef from manage.chef.io website.
• Create a organization

Create EC2 Instances to act as nodes

• Create two instances,
• One for workstation and
• Another one to act as the remote node on AWS account
• The security groups should have the following ports open, 22, 80, 443

Configure Chef Workstation

• Download Chef starter kit from hosted Chef Server

• SCP the starter kit into your workstation and unzip in /root directory. It generates /chef-repo.

  yum install unzip -y
  cd /
  unzip chef-starter.zip
  cd /chef-repo
  curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | bash

• Validate the SSL certificate & authenticate calls to Chef Server knife ssl check

• Validate your connection to the Chef server, One way to do that is to run the knife client list command.

• We have configured our Chef Server(hosted in chef site) and Chef workstation, Authentication is established by the Starter-Kit.

Chef Node[s] bootstrapping

We call the process that installs chef-client on a node and the initial checkin to the Chef server bootstrapping the node.

Bootstrap using key-based authentication

• Lets tag our node as chef-node01. I used the same tag in EC2 as well to remember it easily.
• Copy the EC2 key to your workstation to ./chef/chef-node-key.pem

knife bootstrap <EC2_IP_Addr> \
                --ssh-user ec2-user --sudo \
		--identity-file /chef-repo/.chef/<AWS_SSH_Key> \
		--node-name chef-node01

• To confirm the list of nodes registered to the Chef-Server

knife node list
or
knife node show chef-node01

• Login to chef node and edit /etc/chef/client.rb file add below line log_level :info

Create cookbook learn-httpd

knife cookbook create learn-httpd

• Go inside directory cookbooks/learn-httpd/recipes

- cd cookbooks/learn-httpd/recipes

• Edit default.rb file add below code to install httpd package.

package "httpd"

service "httpd" do
 action [:enable, :start]
end

file '/var/www/html/index.html' do
 content '<h1> I am on top of the world</h1>'
end

• Upload this new code to your chef server by using below command

knife cookbook upload learn-httpd

• If you want to double-check your cook books knife cookbook list

• Now go to your chef node and run chef-client to get latest cookbooks from servers.

chef-client

• Note: even though our code is currect. It cant install apache. Because we haven’t set this node to run recipes. To do that we should run below command.

knife node run_list add chef-node01 "recipe[learn-httpd]"

• Run chef-client from your node to run the recipe.

• Load the webserver page

curl localhost
or
curl <your_public_ip>

Clean up your environment

Delete the node from the Chef server

knife node delete chef-node01 --yes