Chef for the Absolute Beginners - DevOps

Explore Chef server offerings—open source, enterprise on-prem, and hosted Chef—then set up hosted Chef quickly. Meet prerequisites, configure a persistent hostname and NTP, and launch an AWS demo.

Start with the chef workstation, set prerequisites, and ensure network communication with the chef server. Install chefdk on Windows, macOS, or Linux using yum or apt-get, or the Windows installer.

Create AWS EC2 instances for chef workstation and chef client, select CentOS 7.4 AMI, configure t2.micro, security group, and key pair, then login via PuTTY with PEM to PPK.

Set up the chef workstation as a local development area by configuring hostname and IP mapping, and installing Chef DK to enable Knife communication with the Chef Server.

Configure chef clients by ensuring network connectivity among server, workstation, and client, verify hostnames, and install via package managers or knife bootstrap with prerequisites like ntp, space, and supported os.

Explore the chef architecture with workstation, server, and nodes; see how RSA keys and Knife secure connections to push recipes and cookbooks and manage resources and run lists.

Explore chef resources, the fundamental building blocks used to configure users, register keys, execute scripts, and manage system resources like storage, cron jobs, firewalls, and package managers.

Navigate the Chef resources documentation, understand resource components and actions, and review built-in resources like user and file to confidently write Chef code.

Master chef domain specific language syntax with six simple steps: define resources by type, name, attributes, and actions in a ruby do block, using httpd package, file, and service examples.

Explore a Chef recipe, a resources-based method to configure infrastructure with a web server, then learn to create, check, test, and run recipes locally with Chef Client and Chef Zero.

Explore Chef resources such as user, file, directory, package, and service, and learn the four step code creation process using Chef Zero deployment with local runs and idempotent recipes.

Explore how chef cookbooks organize recipes into a standard directory structure with readme.md and metadata.rb to solve deployment tasks.

Build your first chef cookbook to install, configure, and start the Apache web server, using chef generate, default.rb recipes, and local-mode runs to verify with chef zero.

Explore how Chef RunLists order recipes across nodes using cookbooks and the chef-client, with syntax like recipe [cookbook::recipe], perform dry runs, and manage multiple recipes in a single runlist.

Demonstrate four runlist scenarios in Chef, from single to multiple recipes, using an Apache web server example to install, configure, and verify with dry runs and chef-client execution.

Learn how to use include_recipe to compose recipes from multiple files, organizing large Chef code in default.rb and RunList, with a practical demo.

Learn how to manage cookbook dependencies by linking recipes from other cookbooks, such as linking the ntp server to the web server cookbook, with a quick demo.

Create two cookbooks, ntp server and web server, define dependencies with metadata.rb and depends, use include_recipe, then run a dry run and chef-client to verify sequence.

Explore how to deploy chef code from workstation to server, assign runlists to nodes, and execute chef-client across nodes using knife and ssh.

Configure and test the communication between the Chef workstation and the hosted Chef server using knife to fetch certificates, verify connectivity, and upload the starter cookbook.

Verify network connectivity, set a hostname, and map hosts for a chef client bootstrap. Install, register, and run chef-client to fetch the starter cookbook from the chef server.

Demonstrates production use of Chef automation with a hosted server: validate certificates, upload cookbooks, create run lists, and run chef-client from both client and workstation using Knife.

Explore chef basics like Ohai data collection, kitchen testing, roles, environments, and supermarket. Learn how run lists, attributes, and cookbooks integrate with chef-client to manage node configurations.