So we have a working disposable vm with with vagrant now? Great, let's actually start playing with chef. The first portion we're going to start with is chef-solo which believe it or not can cover 75-85% of the use cases of chef. Keep this in mind, as you go through this book, because honestly if it fits no need to go farther.
The first thing to do is make sure that you are running the correct version of chef-solo. Type these following commands in to confirm we are set up correctly.
[~/vagrant/chef-book] % vagrant up
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
[default] Clearing any previously set forwarded ports...
[default] Creating shared folders metadata...
[default] Clearing any previously set network interfaces...
[default] Preparing network interfaces based on configuration...
[default] Forwarding ports...
[default] -- 22 => 2222 (adapter 1)
[default] Booting VM...
[default] Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes...
[default] Machine booted and ready!
[default] Setting hostname...
[default] Mounting shared folders...
[default] -- /vagrant
14:51:58 [~/vagrant/chef-book] % vagrant ssh
Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-23-generic x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/
Welcome to your Vagrant-built virtual machine.
Last login: Mon Oct 21 13:49:19 2013 from 10.0.2.2
vagrant@chef-book:~$ sudo su -
root@chef-book:~# which chef-solo
/usr/bin/chef-solo
root@chef-book:~# ls -l /usr/bin/chef-solo
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 Oct 21 13:47 /usr/bin/chef-solo -> /opt/chef/bin/chef-soloIf you see something like the above, you have chef-solo installed correctly, and you are good to go. If not, I strongly suggest starting over, and trying to get here cleanly.
After this, go ahead and run chef-solo.
root@chef-book:~# chef-solo
[2013-10-21T14:53:44-05:00] WARN: *****************************************
[2013-10-21T14:53:44-05:00] WARN: Did not find config file: /etc/chef/solo.rb, using command line options.
[2013-10-21T14:53:44-05:00] WARN: *****************************************
Starting Chef Client, version 11.6.2
Compiling Cookbooks...
[2013-10-21T14:53:45-05:00] FATAL: No cookbook found in ["/var/chef/cookbooks", "/var/chef/site-cookbooks"], make sure cookbook_path is set correctly.
[2013-10-21T14:53:45-05:00] FATAL: No cookbook found in ["/var/chef/cookbooks", "/var/chef/site-cookbooks"], make sure cookbook_path is set correctly.
[2013-10-21T14:53:45-05:00] ERROR: Running exception handlers
[2013-10-21T14:53:45-05:00] ERROR: Exception handlers complete
[2013-10-21T14:53:45-05:00] FATAL: Stacktrace dumped to /var/chef/cache/chef-stacktrace.out
Chef Client failed. 0 resources updated
[2013-10-21T14:53:45-05:00] FATAL: Chef::Exceptions::ChildConvergeError: Chef run process exited unsuccessfully (exit code 1)
root@chef-book:~#Yep, it ain't happy. Thats cool, that's expected, I just wanted to make sure you saw it in error state before taking a stab at it.
Ok, so we can run a chef-solo process/run, now lets actually talk about chef-solo. In the simplest terms chef-solo is a local provisioning software that runs through some predetermined configuration decisions, and spits out the machine how you say it should. chef-solo, nay all of chef, uses a compiled top down set of instuctions, or recipes, to build the machine how you want it to be. As you can see with the Compiling Cookbooks... line.
In a more elegant quote from the docs on the opscode side:
chef-solo is an open source version of the chef-client that allows using cookbooks with nodes without requiring access to a server. chef-solo runs locally and requires that a cookbook (and any of its dependencies) be on the same physical disk as the node.
Now let's go on to actually running it successfully!
Move on to A simple cookbook