Getting Help With Chef

We've tried to make the documentation on this wiki as comprehensive as possible, but inevitably folks need to get help.

Chef User Help Resources

All Chef users have access to multiple help resources beyond the information found here on the Chef Wiki.

Real-time Help

The best way to get help immediately is by joining the #chef channel on irc.freenode.net. Several folks from Opscode are there regularly (easily distinguished by 'operator' status), as well as lots of people in the community who have probably run into your issue or something similar themselves. Being a Chef user is being part of a vibrant Open Source community!

See the IRC page for more information.
IRC Logs are maintained as well, which you can conduct a site search against for specific information from previous discussions.

Chef Mailing Lists

Joining the Chef and/or Chef-Dev Mailing Lists can be an excellent way to ask questions, and to interact and participate in discussion on Chef use, gain tips and information on use of Chef, as well as to provide input to product futures.

Sign up for the Chef Mailing Lists at http://lists.opscode.com.

File a Open Source Ticket

If you've found a bug in Chef, Ohai or the Opscode Cookbooks, you'll probably be asked to file a ticket. Our Open Source ticket tracking system is Jira, at tickets.opscode.com.

Hosted Chef and Private Chef Directed Support

If you are a paid customer of Hosted Chef or Private Chef, you can get directed help from Opscode by either starting a discussion on help.opscode.com, or sending email to support@opscode.com. Be sure to provide as much information (as noted to the right) as you can when creating the ticket.

Periodic maintenance is announced in advance via the Opscode Status site, as are any emergent issues with availability. Hosted Chef customers who use Twitter can also receive status announcements by following the Opscode Status Twitter Account.

Training

We offer comprehensive training classes for Chef and Hosted Chef. Classes are conducted by Opscode employees who have years of experience working in the field of distributed configuration management. There is also the Opscode Open Training program, which makes Opscode enterprise training materials freely available to Chef users. See Opscode training for more information. (For a review from a recent Chef Fundamentals attendee, see My Impressions of Opscode Chef Training.)

For online training - within our Guides you'll find a webcast of a training/lab session, a number of walkthrough guides for the installation of common server stacks, how-to guides for specific actions, and tutorials created by community members who were once new to Chef themselves.

Check the FAQs!

General question FAQ about Chef
Troubleshooting and Technical FAQ for when disaster strikes your land
Common Errors encountered with chef-client and knife

Check these locations first, then...

Information Required

First, gather as much information as possible about the issue. The following is needed in almost every case.

Platform and version.
How Chef was installed (packages, RubyGems, from source, etc).
If using RubyGems, how it was installed.
Debug logs from the client. Run "chef-client -l debug".
Debug logs from the server if you are an Open Source Chef Server user. Set "log_level :debug" in /etc/chef/server.rb.
If you custom compiled Ruby (or are using REE).
Anything else specific about your environment that may be helpful.

Log file locations
Check the server or client config file for the log_location.

/etc/chef/server.rb
/etc/chef/client.rb

General Communication and Information

Follow the Opscode Twitter Account for broader company and product news. Hosted Chef customers can also receive status announcements on Hosted Chef maintenance and availability by following the Opscode Status Twitter Account.

Opscode Blog

Our Opscode blog is updated regularly with product information, tips, product releases and previews, training and local Chef User Group meetups, and other information of potential interest. Check out the Blog at Opscode.com, or subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Support