This demo shows you how to use chef to provision a vagrant VM. We then see how Berkshelf makes life easier.

Pre-Requisites

• VirtualBox
• vagrant installed
• Vagrant omnibus - vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus
• Vagrant guest additions - vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
• knife (installed via chef) - gem install chef
  • I'm assuming you have ruby setup. If you want to install chef from scratch, refer to this quickguide

Demo Steps

I've tried to keep commit logs in sync with the actual demo:

• Initialise a vagrant environment using vagrant init
• Create ./cookbooks
• Get nginx cookbook using knife cookbook site download nginx
• The file is unarchived to ./cookbooks and original is deleted - tar -xvf nginx*tar.gz -C ./cookbooks/ && rm nginx*tar.gz
• Update Vagrantfile
  • Forward port 80 to 8080
  • Install chef client via omnibus - config.omnibus.chef_version = 'latest'
  • Uncomment chef provisioning
    • Update cookbook path
    • Include nginx recipe
• Bring up VM - vagrant up
• Observe that provisioning fails because apt cookbook was not included; (log file in VM here - /var/chef/cache/chef-stacktrace.out)
• Observe that provisioning still fails because build essential, ohai, runit and yum cookbooks were not included
• Add all cookbooks and provision again - vagrant provision

Enter Berkshelf. Now install the following:

    gem install berkshelf && \
    vagrant plugin install vagrant-berkshelf

• create Berksfile and add nginx cookbook to it. Note that the right way is to use berks init but here we are trying to understand the basics with just bare-bones
• update Vagrantfile to use berkshelf - config.berkshelf.enabled = true
• remove ./cookbooks folder
• Do a berks install and then vagrant reload