BOSH-Chef

This is a BOSH release of Chef to enable easy creation of client-server Chef clusters of arbitrary sizes on arbitrary infrastructures.

Walkthrough

1. Set up BOSH

Target your BOSH server - ideally your BOSH-Lite server. Follow the README for bosh-lite to set this up, and upload the warden stemcell. There is no need to deploy Cloud Foundry, we're using BOSH to deploy Chef.

$ bosh status
Config
             /home/hato/.bosh_config

Director
  Name       Bosh Lite Director
...

2. Tailor the sample manifest to your BOSH director

Copy the manifest (manifests/chef-manifest.yml) to your own deployments directory, and customise to your BOSH environment. For example:-

~/bosh-chef $ cp manifests/chef-manifest.yml ~
$ sed -i "s/d235f4e9-fc81-4924-b331-3712f16611ec/`bosh status | grep UUID | awk '{print $2}'`/g" ~/chef-manifest.yml

Ensure you have connectivity to the assigned networks.

~/bosh-lite $ scripts/add-route

The routing table can get flushed when starting/stopping virtual machines with some virtualisation technologies so check your routing table if you lose connectivity; you may need to re-run this script.

3. Deploy

Upload a version of the release

bosh-chef $ bosh upload release releases/chef-1.yml

Deploy the cluster

$ bosh deployment ~/chef-manifest.yml
$ bosh deploy

4. Log in and create an admin user

• Log in to your new Chef server; for the BOSH-Lite manifest default this will be on https://10.244.0.30.xip.io/.
• Accept the SSL error if one appears once you've understood it
• Use the default password
• Set a new password and generate a new private key; save this admin key for later use
• Browse to the nodes page to view your lovely Chef clients

5. Configure client and upload cookbook

• Install the Chef Client on your machine.
• Write the admin key you saved earlier to ~/admin.pem
• Write the validation key from the manifest's properties section to ~/validator.pem . You may need to remove the leading whitespace from the key.
• Configure your client - the output will differ by username

~ $ knife configure -i
WARNING: No knife configuration file found
Where should I put the config file? [/home/vagrant/.chef/knife.rb]
Please enter the chef server URL: [https://precise64:443] https://10.244.0.30.xip.io/
Please enter a name for the new user: [vagrant]
Please enter the existing admin name: [admin]
Please enter the location of the existing admin's private key: [/etc/chef-server/admin.pem] ./admin.pem
Please enter the validation clientname: [chef-validator]
Please enter the location of the validation key: [/etc/chef-server/chef-validator.pem] ./validator.pem
Please enter the path to a chef repository (or leave blank): ./chef-repo
Creating initial API user...
Please enter a password for the new user:
Created user[vagrant]
Configuration file written to /home/vagrant/.chef/knife.rb

• Create and upload a cookbook

$ mkdir ~/chef-repo

$ knife cookbook create apache

$ cat <<EOF >~/chef-repo/cookbooks/apache/recipes/default.rb
package "apache2"
EOF

$ knife cookbook upload apache -V

6. Apply cookbook to node(s)

• Log back in to the nodes page
• Select the first node - usually node 0.
• Edit the node and add the apache recipe from the cookbook you uploaded to the run list. Save the node.

7. Wait for convergence and bask in the glow of your own brilliance

If you've used BOSH-Lite and have the routes in place you should be able to view a default apache page on the node you edited once the node has converged (up to three minutes). Doing something useful with the cluster is left as an exercise for the reader.

8. Scale the cluster up

• Edit the manifest to increase the instances of the chef_client job.
• Redeploy

$ bosh deploy

DO NOT USE THIS IN PRODUCTION OR TO STORE ANY DATA!