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Welcome to Chef!

Chef is a systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure. With Chef, you can:

• Manage your servers by writing code, not by running commands. (via Cookbooks)
• Integrate tightly with your applications, databases, LDAP directories, and more. (via Libraries)
• Easily configure applications that require knowledge about your entire infrastructure ("What systems are running my application?" "What is the current master database server?")

Learn about Chef

You want to learn more about Chef? We want to teach you about Chef! How convenient!

Lets start at the top, shall we?

Getting Started

Head over to the Getting Started guide, which will walk you through Installation, creating a Chef Repository, and getting a Cookbook Quick Start at building Cookbooks.

Cooking with Chef

Once you've gotten yourself situated, it's time to go to Cooking School. In this section, we talk about Nodes, Roles, Cookbooks (and their components: Recipes, Definitions, Attributes, Libraries, Files and Templates), Resources, Providers and Search Indexes. It's where you'll learn what each piece of Chef is, and how they all fit together.

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 the four executable parts of Chef - Chef Server, Chef Indexer, Chef Client and Chef Solo. We close with Anatomy of a Chef Run, where we go in-depth with the process by which your systems get configured.

Chef Development

This area reflects parts of Chef that are under active development. The locations of sub-pages may change, as the documentation is also under development.

Getting Help

Having trouble with Chef? Find out how to get help!

Using Chef?

Are you using Chef, either personally or in your organization? If so, please add an entry to the Chef Users List.

Chef Presentations

If you have done a presentation about Chef anywhere, from your local user group or a big conference and don't mind sharing your slide deck, please list and attach it to Chef Presentations.

by Adam Jacob (an hour ago) Resources (Chef)

by Scott M. Likens (4 hours ago) Resources v. 101 (Chef)

by Jesse Nelson (12 hours ago) Resources v. 99 (Chef)

by Joshua Timberman (05 Feb) Bootstrap Chef RubyGems Installation (Chef)

by Joshua Timberman (05 Feb) RubyGems Instructions Excerpt (Chef)

by Joshua Timberman (05 Feb) Installation (Chef)

by Miguel Cabeça (05 Feb) Documentation (Chef)

by Scott M. Likens (05 Feb) 08alpha (Chef)

by Joshua Timberman (04 Feb) MetaChef.png (Chef)

by A. Lester Buck III (04 Feb) Chef Solo (Chef)

by Adam Jacob (04 Feb) Roles (Chef)

by Matthew Kent (04 Feb) Installation on RHEL and CentOS 5 with RPMs (Chef)

by Adam Jacob (04 Feb) Attributes (Chef)

by dreamcat four (03 Feb) Re: Light-weight Resources and Providers (LWRP) (Chef)

by Joshua Timberman (03 Feb) Data Bags (Chef)

A work in progress Chef is young - it's in production use in several places, and can already help you solve many real world problems. But we have big ambitions, and we'll be making lots of improvements. As you explore this wiki and learn about Chef, you'll see flagged areas that we know are going to undergo some renovation. We figured it was better to release early than release perfect - especially considering how much is already being done with Chef.

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