Setting up servers with Chef-Solo

1. buy a VPS (like linode)

2. install ruby and chef solo

you can run this script as root for installing ruby and chef

#!/usr/bin/env bash
apt-get -y update
apt-get -y install build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libreadline6-dev libyaml-dev
cd /tmp
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.gz
tar -xvzf ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.3-p125/
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
gem install chef ruby-shadow --no-ri --no-rdoc

then you can do

ruby -v

and

chef-solo -v

3. setting up the dierectory structure

we want the following basic directory structure for chef cookbooks

/var/chef
├── cookbooks
│   └── main
│       ├── recipes
│       │   └── default.rb
│       └── templates
│           └── default
│               └── zshrc.erb
├── node.json
└── solo.rb

then, the contents of node.json should be like

{
	"run_list": ["recipe[main]"],
}

and the solo.rb

cookbook_path File.expand_path("../cookbooks", __FILE__)
json_attribs File.expand_path("../node.json", __FILE__)

you can see a simple recipe with a template in the repository

4. run chef-solo

chef-solo -c solo.rb

Notes

• this guide was tested with ubuntu 12.04