Configuration management with Chef

Chef de Config

Article from ADMIN 01/2010

By Tim Schürmann

Ever dream of rolling out a complete computer farm with a single mouse click? If you stick to Linux computers and you speak a little Ruby, Chef can go a long way toward making that dream come true.

Chef is basically a server that stores customized configuration guides for software. Clients connected to the server access the recipes and automatically configure their systems on the basis of the rulesets the recipes contain.

To do so, the clients not only modify their configuration files, but – if needed – launch their package managers. If the recipes change, or new ones are added at a later date, the clients affected automatically update to reflect the changes. In an ideal environment, this just leaves it up to the administrator to manage the recipes on the server.

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Before you can enjoy the benefits, the developers behind Chef expect you to put in a modicum of work. For example, recipes are made up of one or multiple standard Ruby scripts. If you need anything beyond the fairly generic recipes available on the web, you need to have a good command of the Ruby scripting language. In other words, your mileage will vary before you deploy a home-grown and home-tested solution.

The installation is another obstacle – and a fairly complex one, too, because the Chef server depends on several other components, each of which in turn requires even more software packages. The Chef server itself is written in Ruby but relies on the RabbitMQ server and on a Java-based full-text search engine, at the same time storing its data in a CouchDB database.

Finally, your choice of operating system is also important. Chef prefers Linux underpinnings, but it will also run on other Unix-flavored operating systems such as Mac OS X, Open Solaris, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, according to the wiki http://1. The fastest approach today is offered by Debian 5, Ubuntu 8.10 or later, or CentOS 5.x. Setting up the server on any other system can be an adventure. This article mainly relates to Debian and Ubuntu for this reason. If

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