Getting Started

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

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.

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

We begin with an Architecture Introduction, covering the basic functions of the Chef Server, Nodes, and Chef Workstations and how these components communicate.
Then an overview of the Core Components, which introduces all of the aspects and components of modeling your infrastructure, Configuring Nodes and Managing Chef.
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.
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.

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.