Exploring the Chef Development Kit

The Chef Development Kit, or ChefDK, is the omnibus installer used to set up a Chef development environment on a workstation. It includes the Chef client itself, an early version of the new Chef tool, an embedded version of Ruby, RubyGems, OpenSSL, and command-line utilities such as Knife, Ohai, and Chef Zero. It also includes community tools, such as Test Kitchen, Foodcritic, Berkshelf, Chef Vault, Rubocop, and ChefSpec.

Included in the ChefDK installer is the new Chef command-line tool. It is the new go-to way to generate cookbooks, recipes, templates, custom resources, and more. It also downloads RubyGems for the chef-client environment, and it will verify the ChefDK installation and configuration.

The Chef client is a key component of everything Chef. The Chef client is not only used on nodes for converging configuration data, but it is also used on workstations and the Chef server.

The Chef Knife

Knife is a command-line tool that supplies the interface between your chef-repo and your Chef server. It allows developers to upload their work on the workstation to the Chef server, from where it can be distributed to the nodes during their Chef client runs. Knife also allows you to obtain cookbooks from the supermarket, and it provides a mechanism to bootstrap nodes.

Community tools

Some of the most commonly used community tools are installed as part of the ChefDK. Test Kitchen is installed, so you can test the results of your recipes and cookbook development on deployed test nodes. Berkshelf is installed to manage your cookbooks and their dependencies. Foodcritic is included in the ChefDK installation. Foodcritic will help you check your cookbooks for common errors and omissions.

Another valuable community tool installed with the ChefDK is Rubocop. You can use it to give you cookbooks some "style" and make sure that you're following the same conventions used by other developers in your organization. There is also ChefSpec, which is based on the ruby tool RSpec. ChefSpec will allow you to unit-test your cookbooks and recipes. We will have to exercise a lot of these community tools in later chapters, so please stay tuned.

References

• Learn more about the Chef Development Kit at https://docs.chef.io/chef_dk.html
• Learn more about Berkshelf in this video-recorded interview at https://www.chef.io/blog/chefconf-talks/the-berkshelf-way-jamie-winsor/
• Learn more about Foodcritic at this link http://www.foodcritic.io/
• Learn about the Knife command line tool at this link: https://docs.chef.io/knife.html
• And download an excellent printable Knife reference guide at this link https://github.com/chef/quick-reference/blob/master/qr_knife_web.png