chef-server README

This cookbook configures a system to be a standalone Chef Server. It
will install the appropriate platform-specific chef-server Omnibus
package from Package Cloud and perform the initial configuration.

It is not in the scope of this cookbook to handle more complex Chef
Server topologies like 'tiered' or 'ha'. Nor is it in the scope of
this cookbook to install and configure premium features or other
add-ons. For clustered Chef Server deployments, see
chef-server-cluster.
For primitives for installing chef-server-core or other Chef Server
add-ons, see
chef-server-ingredient.

It is also not in the scope of this cookbook to handle older versions
of Chef Server, such as 11 or 10. For Chef Server 11, see version
2.1.x of this cookbook on Supermarket, or the chef11 branch of this
repository.

Requirements

This cookbook is tested with Chef (client) 12. It may work with or
without modification on earlier versions of Chef, but Chef 12 is
recommended.

Cookbooks

• chef-server-ingredient cookbook

Platform

This cookbook is tested on the following platforms using the
Test Kitchen .kitchen.yml in the repository.

• RHEL/CentOS 5 64-bit
• RHEL/CentOS 6 64-bit
• Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 64-bit
• Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10 64-bit
• Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10 64-bit

Unlisted platforms in the same family, of similar or equivalent
versions may work with or without modification to this cookbook. For a
list of supported platforms for Chef Server, see the
Chef documentation.

Attributes

The attributes used by this cookbook are under the chef-server name
space.

version | Chef Server version to install. If nil, the
latest version is installed | String | nil

addons | Array of addon packages | Array | Array.new

Previous versions of this cookbook had several other attributes used
to control the version of the Chef Server package to install. This is
deprecated.

Previous versions of this cookbook used configuration as a Hash. This is now deprecated and the configuration should be specified as a String. This must include newlines for each of the configuration items.

Recipes

This section describes the recipes in the cookbook and how to use them
in your environment.

default

This recipe:

• Installs the appropriate platform-specific chef-server Omnibus package from our Package Cloud repository
• Creates the initial /etc/chef-server/chef-server.rb file.
• Performs initial system configuration via chef-server-ctl reconfigure.
• Updates the /etc/hosts file with the api_fqdn if that FQDN cannot be resolved.

addons

Chef addons are premium features that can be installed on the Chef
Server with the
appropriate license. If
there are < 25 nodes managed, or a paid subscription license, addons
can be installed.

This recipe iterates through the node['chef-server']['addons']
attribute and installs and reconfigures all the packages listed.

Install Methods

Bootstrap Chef (server) with Chef (solo)

The easiest way to get a Chef Server up and running is to install
chef-solo (via the chef-client Omnibus packages) and bootstrap the
system using this cookbook:

# install chef-solo
curl -L https://www.chef.io/chef/install.sh | sudo bash
# create required bootstrap dirs/files
sudo mkdir -p /var/chef/cache /var/chef/cookbooks
# pull down this chef-server cookbook
wget -qO- https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/chef-server/download | sudo tar xvzC /var/chef/cookbooks
# pull down dependency cookbooks
for dep in chef-ingredient yum-chef yum apt-chef apt packagecloud
do
  wget -qO- https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/${dep}/download | sudo tar xvzC /var/chef/cookbooks
done
# GO GO GO!!!
sudo chef-solo -o 'recipe[chef-server::default]'

Be sure to download and untar the chef-ingredient, yum-chef, yum, apt-chef, apt, and packagecloud cookbooks. They're dependencies of this cookbook.

If you need more control over the final configuration of your Chef Server instance you can create a JSON attributes file and set underlying configuration via the node['chef-server']['configuration'] attribute. See the [attributes/default.rb](attributes/default.rb)

Then pass this file to the initial chef-solo command:

chef-solo -j /tmp/dna.json

Configuring Chef Server

You can read all about Chef Server's configuration options on the Chef Documentation site.

Specify configuration using the node['chef-server']['configuration'] attribute as a string. Each configuration item should be separated by newlines. This string will be rendered exactly as written in the configuration file, /etc/opscode/chef-server.rb. For example, if we want to change the notification email, we could do this in a wrapper cookbook:

node.default['chef-server']['configuration'] = "notification_email 'chef-server@example.com'"

Or in a dna.json file:

{
  "chef-server": {
    "configuration": "notification_email 'chef-server@example.com'"
  }
}

Or, for multiple configuration settings, such as the notification email and the cache size for nginx, this uses a heredoc:

node.default['chef-server']['configuration'] = <<-EOS
notification_email 'chef-server@example.com'
nginx['cache_max_size'] = '3500m'
EOS

In a dna.json file, we need to insert a \n newline character.

{
  "chef-server": {
    "configuration": "notification_email 'chef-server@example.com'\nnginx['cache_max_size'] = '3500m'"
  }
}

Applying configuration changes

The chef-server-ctl command is the administrative interface to the Chef Server. It has its own documentation. Various administrative functions provided by chef-server-ctl are not in the scope of this cookbook. Special/customized needs should be managed in your own cookbook.

As this cookbook uses the chef-ingredient cookbook, its resources can be used to manage the Chef Server installation. The default recipe in this cookbook exposes chef_ingredient[chef-server] as a resource that can be sent a :reconfigure action from your own cookbooks. The omnibus_service resource can be used to manage the underlying services for the Chef Server. See the chef-ingredient cookbook for more information.

License and Authors

• Author: Seth Chisamore schisamo@chef.io
• Author: Joshua Timberman joshua@chef.io
• Copyright 2012-2015, Chef Software, Inc

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and