Configure Management Workstation As A Chef-Client

IF you want to configure your Management Workstation as a Chef-Client, this page will explain how to do so.

Node vs. Client vs. User vs. Workstation

First, to help avoid any confusion, lets go over terminology. The system where you are doing development and maintaining a cookbook repository we can call a workstation or your management workstation. It is where you run knife commands. A server you want to manage with chef we call a node, and the only command you will run on it should be "sudo chef-client".

A client allows you to access the server API. In general, clients map 1:1 to the list of nodes (every node is a client, and every client represents 1 node.) However, it is possible for a single client to manage multiple nodes - this is most often done for programmatic access to the nodes via the API. A user is an individual: credentialed entities used by humans to connect to the Hosted Platform to manage the organization.

The user is the credentialed entity that manages the organization:

using their management workstation
connecting through the Web UI (Management Console),
using the knife command line tool

The organization is comprised of nodes

systems that are configured and managed by chef

Which run the chef-client software

which has a certificate to authorize its interaction with the server/platform to download cookbooks it needs to run and compile the configuration of the node.

Must I Have My Workstation Be A Chef-Client?

NO You are not required to configure your workstation as a chef-client for interacting with Chef to automate your infrastructure.

Managing your workstation via Chef is a choice, not a requirement. It would be driven by a desire to expand configuration management to the desktop, not by a need for Chef functionality.

Terminology Documentation References

A Can of Condensed Chef Documentation
Includes links to pages with more detail on each topic (if desired), and a call-out link to a glossary

Chef Basics
Includes a call-out link to a nice Chef Speak overview blog post by team member Dan DeLeo.

Having Chef Manage the Configuration of your Management Workstation

To have the Chef Server (or Hosted Chef, as the case may be) manage the configuration of your workstation, you need to configure the client. These directions assume you have already installed knife by following the Installation Guides.

You'll now have a client-config directory in your local repository:

To configure your workstation as a chef client, you just need to copy this directory to /etc/chef:

You have now configured your management workstation as a chef client, and can manage its configuration through Chef!
Yea you!

Installation

Managing Chef