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March 10, 2025 22:19
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Chef Automation Cheatsheet

A comprehensive cheat sheet for Chef, covering installation, basic usage, resources, and advanced configurations for infrastructure automation.

Installation & Setup

Chef Installation

Install Chef on your server using the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install curl

curl -L https://omnitruck.chef.io/install.sh | sudo bash

Verify the installation:

chef-solo -v

Setting Up a Cookbook

Download and extract a cookbook repository:

wget http://github.com/chef-cookbooks/chef-repo/tarball/master -O - | tar xzf - --strip-components=1

Knife Tool

Download cookbooks from the supermarket:

knife supermarket download mysql

Basic Usage

Chef Solo Invocation

Run Chef Solo with a configuration file and JSON attributes:

chef-solo -c solo.rb -j web.json

solo.rb: Chef Solo configuration file.
web.json: JSON file containing node attributes.

Key Chef Concepts

Resources

Represent a desired state for a part of the system (e.g., a package, a file, a service).

Recipes

Collections of resources that define a configuration policy.

Attributes

Define specific settings and data used by resources.

Cookbooks

Packages that contain recipes, attributes, and other related files.

Resource Examples

Compile From Source 

execute "tar --no-same-owner -zxf hi.tar.gz" do
  cwd "/usr/local/src"
  creates "/usr/local/src/node-v#{version}"
end

bash "compile" do
  cwd "/usr/local/src/node-v#{version}"
  code %[PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH ./configure make]
  creates "/usr/local/src/node-v#{version}/node"
end

Remote File Resource 

remote_file "/usr/local/src/hi.tar.gz" do
  source "http://..."
  checksum "ab83be..."
  mode 0644
  action :create_if_missing
end

Ruby Block 

ruby_block "name" do
  block { File.read ... }
  not_if { File.exists?(...) }
end

Execute Resource 

execute "name" do
  cwd "..."
  environment({ "PATH" => "..." })
  command "make install"
  creates "..."
end

Advanced Configuration

Resource Conditions 

creates "/usr/local/src/node-v#{version}/node"
not_if { File.exists?('...') }

File Resource 

file '/path/to/file' do
  content 'This is the file content'
  owner 'www-data'
  group 'www-data'
  mode '0644'
  action :create
end

Package Resource 

package 'apache2' do
  action :install
end

Service Resource 

service 'apache2' do
  action [ :enable, :start ]
end