Introduction

This chapter will cover the basics of Chef, including common terminology, workflow practices, and various tools surrounding Chef. We will explore version control using Git, walk through working with community cookbooks, and running those cookbooks on your own servers to configure them the way you need them.

First, let's talk about the terminology used in the Chef universe.

A **cookbook **is a collection of recipes – codifying the actual resources, which should be installed and configured on your node – and the files and configuration templates needed. Once you've written your cookbooks, you need a way to deploy them to the nodes you want to provision. Chef offers multiple ways for this task. The most widely used way is to use a central Chef Server. You can either run your own or sign up for Opscode's Hosted Chef.

The Chef Server is the central registry where each node needs to get registered. The Chef Server distributes the cookbooks to the nodes based on their configuration settings. Knife is Chef's command-line tool called to interact with the Chef Server. You use it for uploading cookbooks and managing other aspects of Chef.

On your nodes, you need to install Chef Client – the part that retrieves the cookbooks from the Chef Server and executes them on the node.

In this chapter, we'll see the basic infrastructure components of your Chef setup at work and learn how to use the basic tools. Let's get started with having a look at how to use Git as a version control system for your cookbooks.

Version Control

A version control system (VCS) helps you stay sane when dealing with important files and collaborating on them.

Installing Chef on your workstation

Make sure you've curl installed on your box by following the instructions available at http://curl.haxx.se/download.html.