Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook, 2nd Edition: Over 80 recipes to automate your cloud and server infrastructure with Chef and its associated toolset

Key FeaturesBook DescriptionWhat you will learnSet up your local development and testing environment for ChefDebug your cookbooks and Chef runs by using the numerous inspection and logging facilities of ChefDrive your cookbooks from external data or nodespecific attributesManage and scale your cloud infrastructure by automating your configuration managementExtend Chef to meet your advanced needs by creating custom plugins for knife and OhaiTest your Chef cookbooks and infrastructure by writing examplesWho this book is for Cover 1 Copyright 3 Credits 4 About the Author 5 About the Reviewers 6 www.PacktPub.com 9 Table of Contents 10 Preface 14 Chapter 1: Chef Infrastructure 20 Introduction 21 Using version control 21 Installing the Chef development kit on your workstation 24 Using the hosted Chef platform 26 Managing virtual machines with Vagrant 29 Creating and using cookbooks 33 Inspecting files on your Chef server with knife 35 Defining cookbook dependencies 38 Managing cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf 40 Downloading and integrating cookbooks as vendor branches into your Git repository 44 Using custom knife plugins 49 Deleting a node from the Chef server 51 Developing recipes with local mode 52 Using roles 55 Using environments 56 Freezing cookbooks 60 Running Chef client as a daemon 62 Using chef-shell 63 Chapter 2: Evaluating and Troubleshooting Cookbooks and Chef Runs 66 Introduction 67 Testing your Chef cookbooks 67 Flagging problems in your Chef cookbooks 69 Test driven development for cookbooks using ChefSpec 72 Integration testing your Chef cookbooks with Test Kitchen 77 Showing affected nodes before uploading cookbooks 82 Overriding a node's run list to execute a single recipe 83 Using why-run mode to find out what a recipe might do 85 Debugging Chef client runs 87 Inspecting the results of your last Chef run 89 Raising and logging exceptions in recipes 91 Diff-ing cookbooks with knife 93 Using community exception and report handlers 95 Creating custom handlers 97 Chapter 3: Chef Language and Style 102 Introduction 103 Using community Chef style 103 Using attributes to dynamically configure recipes 105 Using templates 108 Mixing plain Ruby with Chef DSL 111 Installing Ruby gems and using them in recipes 114 Using libraries 115 Using definitions 118 Creating your own Lightweight Resource Providers (LWRP) 120 Extending community cookbooks by using application wrapper cookbooks 125 Creating custom Ohai plugins 127 Creating custom knife plugins 131 Chapter 4: Writing Better Cookbooks 136 Introduction 137 Setting the environment variables 137 Passing arguments to shell commands 139 Overriding attributes 141 Using search to find nodes 144 Using data bags 147 Using search to find data bag items 150 Using encrypted data bag items 151 Accessing data bag values from external scripts 154 Getting information about the environment 157 Writing cross-platform cookbooks 158 Finding the complete list of operating systems you can use in cookbooks 161 Making recipes idempotent by using conditional execution 164 Chapter 5: Working with Files and Packages 166 Introduction 166 Creating configuration files using templates 167 Using pure Ruby in templates for conditionals and iterations 169 Installing packages from a third-party repository 172 Installing software from source 176 Running a command when a file is updated 180 Distributing directory trees 182 Cleaning up old files 185 Distributing different files based on the target platform 187 Chapter 6: Users and Applications 190 Introduction 190 Creating users from data bags 191 Securing the Secure Shell Daemon (SSHD) 195 Enabling passwordless sudo 198 Managing NTP 201 Managing nginx 204 Creating nginx virtual hosts 208 Creating MySQL databases and users 212 Managing WordPress sites 216 Managing Ruby on Rails applications 219 Managing Varnish 224 Managing your local workstation 227 Chapter 7: Servers and Cloud Infrastructure 232 Introduction 233 Creating your infrastructure using Chef Provisioning 233 Creating cookbooks from a running system with Blueprint 236 Running the same command on many machines at once 239 Setting up SNMP for external monitoring services 241 Deploying a Nagios monitoring server 243 Building high-availability services using heartbeat 247 Using HAProxy to load-balance multiple web servers 252 Using custom bootstrap scripts 255 Managing firewalls with iptables 257 Managing fail2ban to ban malicious IP addresses 260 Managing Amazon EC2 instances 263 Loading your Chef infrastructure from a file with spiceweasel and knife 267 Index 270 www.it-ebooks.info Chef is a configuration management tool that lets you automate your more cumbersome IT infrastructure processes and control a large network of computers (and virtual machines) from one master server, making for a smoother network without the usual hassle. Are you a system engineer or administrator who has a fundamental understanding of information management systems and infrastructures? Maybe you've already previously played around with Chef? Either way this book has everything you need to get the most out of every aspect of Chef. With over 80 recipes on every possible topic this title takes you through covering the various artifacts of Chef and explains the techniques of building full-fledged real-world solutions. This book is for system engineers and administrators who have a fundamental understanding of information management systems and infrastructure. It helps if you've already played around with Chef; however, this book covers all the important topics you will need to know. If you don't want to dig through a whole book before you can get started, this book is for you, as it features a set of independent recipes you can try out immediately