Current version Chef 0.9.8 is the latest rpm packaged version. This may lag slightly behind the primary gem and apt releases as this is currently a volunteer effort. These instructions use the ELFF yum repository. Matthew Kent currently maintains these packages as a service to the Chef community. Supported distribution releases: CentOS 5.5 CentOS 5.4 CentOS 5.3 Earlier CentOS 5 releases and RHEL 5 should work but haven't been tested with the latest packages. These packages are subject to change or obsoleting as newer packages are prepared and submitted to Fedora for review. The long term goal is making Chef available in Fedora and EPEL. You can follow the progress of this effort in CHEF-522. If you are wanting to submit changes to these packages or build your own checkout the opscode-packages git repository. Source installed rubygems incompatibility These packages assume you're using the rubygems package from the EPEL repository. They will not work with a copy of rubygems installed from source or one that has been updated with gem update --system (thanks to Alex Soto for the heads up) due to different pathing in /usr/lib.

Table of Contents Pre-requisites Install a Server Verify That All Components are Running Configure the Command Line Client Verify Your Knife Client Configuration Create a Knife Client for Your Laptop/Desktop Next Steps Install a Client Configuration

Pre-requisites

We'll assume you have sudo set up for your user. Otherwise su to root to run the commands listed w/ 'sudo' below.

1. Make sure the system has a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) set properly.

   should return a hostname like chef.example.com.

2. Iptables needs to allow the proper ports (4000 by default for the server, 4040 for the webui), or be disabled.
3. Install the EPEL Yum Repository.
4. Install the ELFF Yum Repository.

Package Sources These instructions assume you are only using the EPEL and ELFF yum repositories (in addition to the base installed repositories) for your installed packages. These packages may not be compatible with ruby or other dependencies carried in other yum repositories or installed from source.

Install a Server

Install the Chef Server RPM from ELFF.

This will:

• Install all the dependencies for Chef Server, including Merb, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, Java etc. The dependency tree can be pretty large on a new install - 73 packages for 161MB during a recent test.
• Add configuration files in /etc/chef for the client, server, solr, solr-indexer and solo.
• Create all the correct directory paths per the configuration files.

After chef-server is installed you can start couchdb, rabbitmq, chef-solr, chef-solr-indexer and chef-server. We'll also ensure the services start on boot by marking them as on.

This does the following:

• Starts CouchDB which listens on localhost:5984.
• Starts rabbitmq which listens on *:5672.
• Starts chef-solr, a Java application listening on *:8983 (CHEF-1086). Drops privileges to the chef user.
• Starts chef-solr-indexer which connects to rabbitmq/solr. Drops privileges to the chef user.
• Starts chef-server, a merb application using thin which listens on *:4000. Drops privileges to the chef user.

If you are planning on using the webui start and enable the chef-server-webui service:

The webui listens on *:4040 by default.

Alternately you can install the chef-server meta package to get both the chef-server-webui, chef-server-api and chef-solr installed.

Verify That All Components are Running

Now that you have Chef Server installed, you should have the following processes running.

Configure the Command Line Client

Once you've verified that all of Chef's components are working, it's time to configure the knife command line tool. On your Chef Server, run knife configure -i to interactively configure your knife client and create an admin account on the server. You can accept the default responses by pressing <enter>.

A client is like a user, except it has a RSA private key instead of a password. What you're picking here is the username for the client you're creating:

knife configure -i has to use an existing admin client's credentials to create your account. On a brand new server, the Web UI is the only admin client. So just use the defaults here:

The "chef-validator" client is a special account used to auto-register new nodes. The defaults should be fine here.

Verify Your Knife Client Configuration

You can now run some basic knife commands to verify that you can communicate with the server:

Create a Knife Client for Your Laptop/Desktop

Create Your Client Account

When working with chef, you will spend a lot of time editing recipes and other files, and you'll find it much more convenient to edit them on your laptop/desktop, where you have your editor configured just to your liking. To facilitate this mode of working, we recommend you create a knife client to use knife on your development machine.

Make sure you've configured knife on your chef server as described above before proceeding with this step.

This command creates the client and writes its private key to /tmp/my-username.pem. To verify the operation, use the knife client show command:

Copy Your Key and Configure Knife

Now you need to copy the key you just created to your development machine using scp (or some other file copy mechanism).

In order to use knife on your laptop, you'll need to install the chef-client. If your laptop's OS comes with rubygems (Mac OS X, for example) you can run sudo gem install chef; otherwise, check out the client installation instructions for your OS. Once you have chef installed, you can use knife's interactive configuration on your laptop (note we're not using the -i option here):

Knife looks for its configuration in HOME/.chef/knife.rb by default:

Now, enter your client name, exactly as you did when running knife client create above:

For these next settings, you can accept the defaults for now and update them later by editing your knife.rb file. The validation client name and key are used with knife's cloud computing commands:

We'll also leave the path to the chef repository blank for now. After you've created a chef repository, you'll want to configure it by editing knife.rb

Verify Your Configuration

You can run some list and show commands to verify everything is working:

Next Steps

Now that you have a working Chef installation, it's time to start configuring your infrastructure:

• Read up on Chef's concepts and terminology
• Get a repository to organize your work
• Learn how to write cookbooks

Install a Client

Install just a client. This is also applicable if you're planning to run chef-solo.

This also installs the very handy knife command.

If you are planning to run chef-solo, you can skip the next step. The configuration file for chef-solo is /etc/chef/solo.rb.

Start and enable the chef-client service:

Configuration

You may wish to take a look at the configuration files and see if they meet your needs, or modify for your environment. The files are commented, and located in /etc/chef (*.rb in that directory).

Next you'll probably want to set up a local repository to store configuration for your infrastructure and setup a copy of knife. Thierry Thelliez has put together a great Hello World example that includes the setup of both.