Chef Basics – Hello World for Chef
In my last post, we covered setting up the basic install of the Chef Server, the Chef client, and a test node that we bootstrapped with Chef. Now let’s talk about some of the basics and hopefully by the end of this post we’ll get to see Chef in action! Let’s start off by talking about some of the basic constructs with Chef…
Cookbooks
Cookbooks can be seen as the fundamental configuration item in Chef. Cookbooks are used to configure a specific item. for instance, you might have a cookbook that’s called ‘mysql’ that’s used to install and configure a MySQL server on a host. There might be another cookbook called ‘httpd’ that installs and configures the Apache web server on a host. Cookbooks are created on the Chef client and then uploaded and stored on the Chef server. As we’ll see going forward, we don’t actually spend much time working directly on the Chef server. Rather, we work on the Chef client and then upload our work to the server for consumption by Chef nodes.
Recipes
Recipes are the main building block of cookbooks. Cookbooks can contain the Continue reading