Documentation

Useful Documentation

• Chef Wiki as a PDF

  The entire wiki, as a single PDF file - As of 1/1/2012 - (21.1Mb)
  

• A Can of Condensed Chef Documentation

  A brief explanation of each chef component, linking off to additional detail.
  

• Glossary

  A glossary of terms, technologies and concepts used by Chef and in working with Chef.
  

• Chef Configuration Settings

  Each Chef executable is configured through the Chef::Config object. In this page, settings are first listed in the Ruby DSL context, followed by a description of the setting and applicable executable context.
  

• Just Enough Ruby for Chef

  Ruby is a language designed to be easy to read and to behave exactly as you'd expect, so it shouldn't take you too long to get up to speed.
  

• Release Notes

  The release notes for the current version of chef, with historical release note for previous versions.
  

• Chef OmniGraffle & Visio Stencils

  A set of stencils for use with OmniGraffle for creating diagrams.

Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef

Community member Stephen Nelson-Smith has written Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef.

He demonstrates a radical approach to developing web infrastructure that combines the powerful Chef configuration management framework with Cucumber, the leading Behavior-driven development (BDD) tool. Learn how developing code test-first allows you to make significant changes without the fear of unexpected side effects.

DZone Refcardz

Community member and IRC participant Jeffrey Hulten put together this handy DZone Refcardz for Chef.

Download this free "cheat sheet" from DZone, and use it and Chef to easily create a fully automated infrastructure of any size.

Lesson Plan

You want to learn more about Chef? We want to teach you about Chef! How convenient! Lets start at the top, shall we?

Fast Start Guide

Head over to the Fast Start Guide, which will walk you through the following:

• Install Chef on your local workstation
• Set up a Chef Repository for storing your cookbooks and other "infrastructure as code."
• Download a cookbook for managing a new Chef Node.

It takes a few assumptions to get you up and running as quickly as possible.

Chef Basics

Learn some of the central concepts of configuration management benefits for your infrastructure.

1. We begin with an Architecture Introduction, covering the basic functions of the Chef Server, Nodes, and Chef Workstations and how these components communicate.
2. Then an overview of the Core Components, which introduces all of the aspects and components of modeling your infrastructure, Configuring Nodes and Managing Chef.
3. Onward to Cooking School and begin an Introduction to Cookbooks and More. Cookbooks are Chef's fundamental units of distribution, the way Chef users package up, distribute and share configuration information. Recipes, Resources, Attributes, Roles and more are also introduced.
4. The final basic section is an Introduction to Search and Data Bags, two of Chef's most powerful features allowing you to dynamically change the configuration of your infrastructure based on data.

Chef Architecture

With all that under your belt, it's time to tackle the dirty secrets of what's happening behind the scenes with Chef Architecture. We'll give you the scoop on Chef's Authentication and Authorization system and go over the Anatomy of a Chef Run, where we go in-depth with the process by which your systems get configured. From there we'll review all the executable parts of Chef - Chef Client, Chef Solo, Chef Server, Chef Indexer, and Server API and Cookbook Site API interaction.