Creating cookbooks from a running system with Blueprint

Everyone has it: that one server in the corner of the data center, which no one dares to touch anymore. It's like a precious snowflake: unique and infinitely fragile. How do you get such a server under configuration management?

Blueprint is a tool that can find out exactly what's on your server. It records all directories, packages, configuration files, and so on.

Blueprint can spit out that information about your server in various formats; one of them is a Chef recipe. You can use such a generated Chef recipe as a basis to rebuild that one unique snowflake server.

Let's see how to do that.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have Python and Git installed on the node that you want to run Blueprint on. Install Python and Git by running the following command:

user@server:~$ sudo apt-get install git python python-pip

How to do it…

Let's see how to install Blueprint and create a Chef cookbook for our node:

1. Install blueprint using the following command...