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Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

Chapter 2. Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs

"Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them."
Henry Ford

In this chapter, we'll cover the following recipes:

Testing your Chef cookbooks
Flagging problems in your Chef cookbooks
Test-driven development for cookbooks using ChefSpec
Integration testing your Chef cookbooks with Test Kitchen
Showing affected nodes before uploading cookbooks
Overriding a node's run list to execute a single recipe
Using why-run mode to find out what a recipe might do
Debugging Chef client runs
Inspecting the results of your last Chef run
Raising and logging exceptions in recipes
Diff-ing cookbooks with knife
Using community exception and report handlers
Creating custom handlers

Description

This book is for system engineers and administrators who have a fundamental understanding of information management systems and infrastructure. It helps if you've already played around with Chef; however, this book covers all the important topics you will need to know. If you don't want to dig through a whole book before you can get started, this book is for you, as it features a set of independent recipes you can try out immediately.

What you will learn

Set up your local development and testing environment for Chef

Debug your cookbooks and Chef runs by using the numerous inspection and logging facilities of Chef

Drive your cookbooks from external data or nodespecific attributes

Manage and scale your cloud infrastructure by automating your configuration management

Extend Chef to meet your advanced needs by creating custom plugins for knife and Ohai

Test your Chef cookbooks and infrastructure by writing examples

What do you get with Print?

Instant access to your digital eBook copy whilst your Print order is Shipped

Paperback book shipped to your preferred address

Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

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Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

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Michael Aug 08, 2015

I really like this book so far. I was concerned that the recipe format would not be best for a beginner but it has great step-by-step guides in here that will bring you up to speed quickly. Highly recommend for those just learning Chef.

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John D. Aug 09, 2015

It helps to have a basic understanding of how Chef works before this book is really valuable, and this book could be summed up as chapters full of bite-sized mini-HOWTOs that help you get from basic knowledge to really knowing your way around.I use Chef a lot, and really enjoyed reading the first edition of this book, and I hadn't used Chef a whole ton back then. Upon reading the second edition, I'm still able to have some "a-ha" moments, and further my understanding. Another great way to think about this book is a substitute for the Chef documentation - it's a great cheat sheet for some of the most common tasks you'll perform.Some of the only quirks (should only impact novice to intermediate users):- the lack of visual representations, but this will matter a lot less if you have some experience- the mini-HOWTO (my description) sections have 'how it works' subsections at the end - you may want to skip ahead if things don't make sense- it would also really help to have a basic understanding of git and vagrant before startingSide note: this is in the upper 5% of Packt Publishing books I've readTL;DR: a must-have resource for any Chef user, and the only books that compare in any way are the O'Reilly books on Chef

Antonio Dec 22, 2015

Very helpful reading. I have worked with Ansible an Salt before and this book got me up to speed with Chef. Of course, it's not deeply elaborating specific points but if you already have knowledge of configuration management this will help you to catch up quickly.

Jean Remy Aug 05, 2015

This book has a lot of great examples which helped me tremendously testing some of the recipes. As an intermediate user it was fairly easy to work my way through the chapters. However, this book is not for a novice user since it does not have a lot of diagrams to explain visually the overall intent of each recipes.

Matthew Dresden Dec 21, 2016

This is too far out of date to be of any practical use, but unfortunately this is the case for all Chef books.Chefs docs and Github are the only place worth looking at, plus someone who already knows chef.It would otherwise be a very long painful process to real use chef appropriately.It advises against wrapping, which is now the standard.