A "Hello World" from Chef

If - like me - you're a developer beginning to play around with Chef, perhaps you've found that many quick start tutorials seem more Ops than Dev. Read on for a Hello, World mixed with some opinions about development on Chef. Thanks toJonathan Otto and morethanseven for blazing this trail.

An efficient feedback loop matters to me, and isolation between projects. Installing a server and setting up a workstation for each project sounds too slow.

So use chef-solo[1]

$ chef-solo --version
Chef: 0.10.8

in a workspace for project hello

$ mkdir --parents chef-workspace/hello
$ cd chef-workspace/hello

under version control

$ git init 

Isolate the new project from its environment by grouping the configuration files together

$ mkdir config

and separate them from the code

$ mkdir cookbooks

A minimal configuration to wire in this project layout, setting the conventional cookbook_path, may be written in Ruby

cookbook_path File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', "cookbooks"))

Save this into config/chef-solo-config.rb, a reasonable naming convention for the configuration file passed to chef-solo. Attributes declaring the exercise are passed through a second file, encoded in JSON. A minimal Hello, World exercise, running just the default recipe from a cookbook called hello_world, is

{"run_list": ["recipe[hello_world]"]}

Save this config/from-hello_world-run-default.json, a conventional name for an exercise that runs the default recipe from the hello_world cookbook. Create a directory for this cookbook

$ mkdir cookbooks/hello_world

with space ready for a recipe

$ mkdir cookbooks/hello_world/recipes

Chef supports logging out-of-the-box, and so an easy way to say hello is

log("Hello, World") { level :info }

Save this into cookbooks/example/recipes/default.rb, and Chef will run this when the no recipe name is given (for this cookbook).

Ready to cook[2]

$ sudo chef-solo --config config/chef-solo-config.rb 
   --json-attributes config/from-hello_world-run-default.json
[...] INFO: Starting Chef Solo Run
[...] INFO: Replacing the run_list with ["recipe[hello_world]"] from JSON
[...] INFO: Hello, World
[...] INFO: Chef Run complete in 0.885143 seconds

Hello, World — served up by Chef.

Simple.

A few more sophisticated examples are queued in the draft pipeline, so check back later for more on Chef - or subscribe to the feed.

---

[1] Chef moves fast: install the lates
[2] unless you forget to sudo

$ chef-solo --config config/chef-solo-config.rb 
     --json-attributes config/from-hello_world-run-default.json

[...] FATAL: Failed to read the private key /etc/chef/client.pem: 
#<Errno::EACCES: Permission denied - /etc/chef/client.pem>, 
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/rest/auth_credentials.rb:59:in 
 `read'/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/rest/auth_credentials.rb:59:in 
 `load_signing_key'/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/rest/auth_credentials.rb:33:in 
 `initialize'/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/rest.rb:40:in 
 `new'/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/rest.rb:40:in 
 `initialize'/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/client.rb:54:in 
  `new'/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/client.rb:54:in 
 `initialize'/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/application/solo.rb:180:in 
 `new'/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/application/solo.rb:180:in 
 `setup_application'/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/application.rb:61:in 
  `run'/usr/bin/chef-solo:24
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/rest/auth_credentials.rb:62:in 
 `load_signing_key': I cannot read /etc/chef/client.pem, 
   which you told me to use to sign requests! 
    (Chef::Exceptions::PrivateKeyMissing)
 from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/rest/auth_credentials.rb:33:in `initialize'
 from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/rest.rb:40:in `new'
 from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/rest.rb:40:in `initialize'
 from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/client.rb:54:in `new'
 from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/client.rb:54:in `initialize'
 from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/application/solo.rb:180:in `new'
 from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/application/solo.rb:180:in `setup_application'
 from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/chef/application.rb:61:in `run'
 from /usr/bin/chef-solo:24