Learning Chef

Chapter 15. Environments

Environments are a feature of Chef Server used to model the server configurations required during each phase of your software development lifecycle, as shown in Figure 15-1.

Figure 15-1. Environments overview

Environments reflect your patterns and workflow, and can be used to model the life stages of your application, such as:

• Development
• Testing
• Staging
• Production

Every Chef Server starts out with a single environment, the _default environment.

Environments might include attributes necessary for configuring your infrastructure, such as:

• The URL of a payment service API
• The location of a package repository
• The version of Chef configuration files that should be used

Environments allow for isolating resources on a Chef Server because environments can contain version constraints, unlike with roles. Environments still have a use even when you have Test Kitchen at your disposal, because you’ll probably want to do some testing against servers in your production environment.

Create a Dev Environment

Environments can be created and managed in the same fashion as data bags and roles, organized in a directory under chef-playground. The directory name is environments by default.

Use the chef-playground directory you created in Chapter 11. Use the same dual command prompt setup you used there. Start the chef-zero server on an open port in one window. We will be ...