Learning Chef

Chapter 10. Community and the Chef-Client Cookbook

In this chapter we’ll be talking about the Chef community and community cookbooks. The Chef community site provides access to great Chef resources, including cookbooks, knife plug-ins, and the ability to connect to amazing people who create wonderful things built on Chef.

Before we get started, make sure you are running Chef Server and the node you created in Chapter 9. We’ll be making heavy use of the knife command line tool in this chapter, and it requires a Chef Server setup to function.

Using Community Cookbooks

Although we’ve been writing all the cookbooks and recipes we’ve used so far in this book, so you can learn Chef coding, there is an easier way. There are hundreds of freely available prewritten Chef cookbooks to install and configure a variety of commonly used services and applications in production environments. For instance, there are cookbooks to help you set up Apache, Nginx, and IIS web servers and MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle databases. There are cookbooks to support the deployment of apps written in Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, node.js, and much, much more!

You can browse and download these community cookbooks from Chef Software’s Chef Supermarket community hub, and from a variety of other locations including GitHub. Some of these cookbooks were created and are maintained by Chef Software, but the majority are developed by Chef users. In general, as with any third-party software, you ...