Backing Up Chef Server

Which method you chose depends on your existing infrastructure. For instance, if your team is familiar with Chef and development practices then using the source control method is more flexible and less susceptible to data corruption. On the other hand, backing up the database and associated files on disk fits better into organizations with traditional disaster recovery systems with centralized backup.

Manage Chef objects in Source Control

Chef enables the reconstruction of your business from nothing but a source code repository, an application data backup, and bare metal machines. With Chef, you define in source code how each part of your infrastructure is built. Cookbooks, roles, data bags and environments should be created as JSON files in source control, and then uploaded to the Chef Server.

Disaster recovery then becomes:

1. Create new Chef Server using preferred method
2. Load objects from source control using knife

Using source control also means that previous versions are always available for restoration and provides a log for auditing changes.

Export objects from the Chef server

• Use this Knife Exec script to perform a backup of an existing Chef Server:

• Run the knife exec script

This will export your data bags, roles, and nodes stored on the chef server as JSON files within the .chef/chef_server_backup directory. Simply copy that directory and all files within to your backup location, and you'll have all of the objects that you use within Chef available to you as JSON files. These files can be uploaded to a new Chef server using knife.

CouchDB Backup

As indicated in CouchDB Administration for Chef Server, the CouchDB database can become quite large over time, so you may want to use Compaction on the database prior to backup. Please review the Compaction section of CouchDB Administration for Chef Server for details if you desire to pursue this prior to backup, and ensure that you compact the views as well.

A minimal backup consists of configuration files and a dump of the CouchDB database. For all platforms, locate your database, configuration, and log files and perform a filesystem copy. Be careful to preserve file permissions, too. Archive these files to wherever you want-- ideally on a different machine in a different physical location – with appropriate security limiting access.

For example, here are the directories to backup for a CouchDB install on Ubuntu:

• Configuration: /etc/couchdb/
• Database files: /var/lib/couchdb/
• Logs: /var/log/couchdb/

You'll want to backup both the .couch database file (which contains many objects, including the index to the cookbooks) and the directory in 'checksum_path' specified in your server.rb, which contains the file contents. One possible example:

The SOLR Search index the RabbitMQ queue Chef Indexer should be rebuilt upon restoration.

CouchDB Administration for Chef Server

Hosted Chef