Re-introducing Chef

If you are reading this book, then you've probably been working with Chef for some time now, and you know the many benefits it brings. You may also know that, in the past, it was a somewhat daunting task to set up a new Chef workstation. You had to download and install Chef, then download and install a variety of community tools, and make sure that all the versions were compatible and configured correctly.

Today, a lot of the work is done for you via the ChefDK. Once you install it, you have a basic workstation setup and are ready to create, modify, and test Chef code.

What version of the Chef tools do I use?

To make it easy to follow along with the contents, let's go over the versions of the tools that will be used throughout this book.

In March 2016, chef.io announced the release of ChefDK 0.12.0, which includes Chef client 12.8.1. As this is the latest version at the time of writing, I will be using it as the version for this book. All of the examples shown will be based on this version of the ChefDK and Chef client. This is very exciting because a lot of really exciting changes are in this release, including Policies and the transition from Resource Providers to Custom Resources.

Currently, there are ChefDK installers available for Mac OS, Windows OS, and Linux OS (RHEL, Debian, and Ubuntu). In the examples within this book, the workstation used will be Mac OS X, so the ChefDK version will be the Mac OS version.

With the many choices available to use for your Chef Server mode, including Hosted Chef Server, Private Chef Server, Open Source Chef Server, and Chef-Solo, it would be difficult to show examples for each mode. Therefore, the majority of examples you'll see in this book will be based on using the Hosted Chef Server mode. Later in this chapter, I will briefly review the installation and setup of a Private Chef Server onto an Ubuntu server, for readers who want to use Chef Server on-premise.

Which OS do I use for my workstation? Everyone has their own, nearly religious, choice for the best workstation platform. However, it would make this book way too long to provide examples for the major OSes alone. Therefore, to keep the focus on Chef content and not on the differences between workstation implementations, I will be using a Mac OS X (Yosemite version 10.10) workstation for the examples. I may at times show additional examples on a Windows or Ubuntu workstation where the differences are significant and worth the extra detail. And for the nodes used in the examples, a variety of OSes will be represented in the hope of having some overlap with the reader's real environment.

References

• IT infrastructure automation begins at https://www.chef.io/
• Additional opportunities to learn Chef can be found at https://learn.chef.io/