Learning Chef

Preface

What Is This Book?

Learning Chef is an introductory book on the Chef infrastructure automation platform. This is a book for beginners who are new to Chef, configuration management, and automation coding.

Using Chef, you can model the setup, packaging, and delivery of applications in your infrastructure as code. We’ll show you how using code makes actions easily repeatable, while running commands by hand is not. Once you have this code blueprint, you can then build or rebuild your whole infrastructure’s application stack in minutes or hours, instead of the days or weeks it would typically take doing by hand. In this book, we’ll cover the basics of Chef, assuming you have no prior experience with infrastructure automation or coding.

First, we’ll get started by showing you how to set up a Chef development environment on your own local machine. This is where you will write Chef code and verify that it works. Learning how to code takes a lot of hands-on practice, so we try to get you to dive in and start writing code very early in the book. Then we progress slowly, introducing one new concept along with its accompanying Chef tool in each chapter. Hands-on examples are provided to help cement the concepts in your mind and to give you practice coding.

After you’ve read Learning Chef, you will understand all the basic concepts and be ready to pick up and benefit from two more advanced books on Chef, such as the O’Reilly books Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef, 2nd Edition, by Stephen ...