Installing using native Ubuntu or Debian ensures that Chef is installed in the same way as other software on your system.

These instructions use the Opscode APT repository for installing Chef 10. Opscode maintains the packages in this APT repo, as well as the packages that get included in Debian and Ubuntu's repositories.

These install instructions are deprecated in favor of the Omnibus installers and Chef 11.

The following distributions are supported within the Opscode APT repository:

• Ubuntu 12.04 precise
• Ubuntu 11.10 oneiric
• Ubuntu 11.04 natty
• Ubuntu 10.10 maverick
• Ubuntu 10.04 lucid
• Debian (unstable) sid
• Debian (testing) wheezy
• Debian 6 (stable) squeeze

Install Processes

Installing chef-server using the Opscode provided packages for Debian and Ubuntu requires that you:

1. Add the Opscode Apt Repository to your apt sources,
2. Install the chef-server package and its dependencies,
3. Verify the installation succeeded, and
4. Complete the Post-Install configuration

The following sections take you through each of these steps in detail.

Add the Opscode APT Repository

Create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/opscode.list.

If you would like to be able to download source packages, add an additional identical line, but change deb to deb-src line.

You can copy and paste these examples to create the necessary sources.list entry:

Debian users will likely need to run 'apt-get install sudo wget lsb-release' as root before pasting the examples.

Add the GPG Key and Update Index

Before you install the packages, make sure you add the Opscode GPG key to apt.

Issues downloading from gnupg.net? If you get an error when trying to download the key that states that the "keyserver timed out", try downloading the key directly from our apt repository instead: Afterwards you'll also want to run this command again:

Now, we update apt-get with the newly added Opscode repository:

Installing the opscode-keyring package will keep the key up-to-date:

Upgrade Existing Packages

To ensure you are using the latest versions of libraries that chef depends on, you may wish to update your existing packages:

Install the chef-server package

You will be prompted by debconf for the Chef Server URL. Put in a value like "http://chef.example.com:4000". You will also be prompted for the rabbitmq consumer password and the webui admin password. The rabbitmq consumer password MUST NOT be left blank.

This will:

• Install all the dependencies for Chef Server, including Merb, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, etc.
• Starts CouchDB (via the couchdb package).
• Starts RabbitMQ (via the rabbitmq-server package).
• Start chef-server-api via /etc/init.d/chef-server, running a merb worker on port 4000
• Start chef-server-webui via /etc/init.d/chef-server-webui, running a merb worker on port 4040
• Start chef-solr-indexer via /etc/init.d/chef-solr-indexer, connecting to the rabbitmq-server
• Start chef-solr via /etc/init.d/chef-solr, using the distro package for solr-jetty
• Start chef-client via /etc/init.d/chef-client
• 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

If you do not want the webui installed, install the server-api and expander packages separately:

This does the same as above without the chef-server-webui service.

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 shown in brackets by pressing <enter>.

First, create the ~/.chef directory and copy the required certificates created by the server.

Certificates Read Only Presumably you're running this as a normal non-privileged user. When the chef-server-api starts, it creates the validation and webui certificates as read/write only by the user that starts the process (chef).

Next run the knife configure command, and pass the -i flag so the initial client that will be used to authenticate with the API.

API Client creation must use an existing admin client's credentials to create the new account. On a brand new server, the chef-webui is created by chef-server-api startup. Use the default for the clientname, and specify the webui.pem copied above.

The "chef-validator" client is a special account used to auto-register new nodes. Use the default clientname, and specify the validation.pem copied above.

Finally, specify a location for the Chef Repository. This is used to configure knife to point to the directory where Cookbooks will be stored.

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 (your management workstation), 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:

You're now ready to use Knife Bootstrap to automatically set up systems to become new Chef Clients to the server.

Installation

Installing Chef Client and Chef Solo