Chef is a great new way to install and configure services on a servers. It's written in Ruby and was released under an open source license in Jan 2009. Slides from my talk at the Melbourne Ruby Users Group

1. Chef
systems integration framework

2. install,
configure
& control
... servers in your sleep

3. Mar 06, 2008
Born

4. Jan 05, 2009
Released

5. Apr 24, 2009
Funded

6. Chef is a
pup with
BIG paws

7. So what does it do?

8. chef-client periodically contacts chef-server for instructions

11. chef-client
authenticates via openid
submits local system info collected with Ohai
runs recipes received from the server

12. chef-server
keeps record of nodes in CouchDB
provides chef-client with a json file with recipes
has a copy of your cookbooks

13. Cookbooks

14. Recipe details

15. Attributes

16. Templates

17. Recipe

19. Using ruby in recipes
package "mysql-client" do
package_name value_for_platform(
[ "centos", "redhat", "suse" ] => { "default" => "mysql" },
"default" => "mysql-client"
)
action :install
end
r = gem_package "mysql" do
version "2.7"
action :nothing
end
r.run_action(:install)

20. testing for cookbooks?

21. chef-solo
chef-client alternative that doesn’t require chef-server
used for installing chef server/client

22. For more information
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home