Getting Started

To begin, install Chef’s omnibus installer: Chef DK

Chef uses the chef tool for creating cookbooks, downloading cookbooks, and many other things.

chef generate repo chef-repo

This creates a chef-repo for connecting to Chef Server.

While this is great for getting started with Chef, creating cookbooks and keeping them in version control gets weird, since this is a single repo.

Cookbooks

Chef Cookbooks are composed of recipes written in Ruby plus a Chef Ruby sugar for automating installing an application like Redis, Postgres, Solr, etc. Take a look at some of the community cookbooks:

Chef Supermarket

Lets say you want to modify a cookbook (these are called wrapper cookbooks)

Where do we keep track of our changes? Right in the chef repo?

There must be a better way for managing cookbooks, Berkshelf to the rescue.

ermahgerd berkshelf

Berkshelf?

Included in the Chef DK, Berkshelf solves the problem of creating Chef cookbooks. This lets us version individual cooksbooks and their dependencies.

Jamie Winsor gives a great overview of what Berkshelf brings to the table: The Berkshelf Way (you’ll also find out why that meme is important…)

berks init . for an existing cookbook.

or

berks cookbook test_cookbook to create a new cookbook.

Write a Cookbook

Here’s the full cookbook for a Solr instance: Apache Solr Cookbook

The salient parts are these three files:

  • metadata.rb : tells Chef about the cookbooks we depend on.
  • attributes/default.rb : configurable attributes for others to override.
  • recipes/default.rb : default recipe for running this cookbook.

The default.rb can be broken down into three easy steps:

1. Install Java (if configured, defaults to yes)

2. Download Solr and run install_solr_service.sh

3. Setup logs and start e Solr service

Deploying with Vagrant

vagrant logo

vagrant plugin install vagrant-berkshelf

Vagrantfile

# Solr uses port 8983 by default
config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 8983, host: 8983

config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|
    chef.run_list = [
      'recipe[apache_solr::default]'
    ]
end

vagrant up; vagrant provision

If all went according to plan you’ll have a Solr instance at localhost:8983