Deploying with Chef

Chef is a Ruby-based deployment system from Opscode.

It is pretty easy to try out Chef; for fun, we can do it in a Docker container so we don't pollute our host environment with our experiments:

docker run -it ubuntu

We need the curl command to proceed with downloading the chef installer:

apt-get -y install curl
curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | bash

The Chef installer is built with a tool from the Chef team called omnibus. Our aim here is to try out a Chef tool called chef-solo. Verify that the tool is installed:

chef-solo -v

This will give output as:

Chef: 12.5.1

The point of chef-solo is to be able to run configuration scripts without the full infrastructure of the configuration system, such as the client/server setup. This type of testing environment is often useful when working with configuration systems, since it can be hard to get all the bits and pieces in working order while developing the configuration that you are going to deploy.

Chef prefers...