Installing Chef - mlafeldt/chef-runner GitHub Wiki

You can tell chef-runner to install Chef on the target machine before provisioning it. This allows you to, for example, provision bare servers that have nothing installed but the base operating system.

To install Chef, use the -i option (or --install-chef), which accepts the following values:

$ chef-runner -i 11.12.8 ... # install a specific Chef version
$ chef-runner -i latest ...  # always install the latest version
$ chef-runner -i true ...    # install Chef if not already installed
$ chef-runner -i false ...   # do nothing (the default)