The quick and dirty way…
Prep work
For me, I stood up two Centos 6.5 instances in virtualbox. I did the basics of installing the EPEL repo, groupinstall of “Base” and “developer tools” in YUM, setup and configured a user for myself.
Create my user:
useradd -m -G wheel seth passwd seth
Install EPEL repo:
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm sudo rpm -Uvh remi-release-6*.rpm epel-release-6*.rpm
YUM Groupinstall:
sudo yum groupinstall base "developer tools"
Downloading the needed files
http://www.getchef.com/chef/install/
First we will install the server…
For the server
Pick which package you need here and download it to the “chef-server”
cd /opt
sudo wget "https://opscode-omnibus-packages.s3.amazonaws.com/el/6/x86_64/chef-server-11.0.12-1.el6.x86_64.rpm"
sudo rpm -ivh chef-server-11.0.12-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure
This command will set up all of the required components, including Erchef, RabbitMQ, and PostgreSQL
sudo chef-server-ctl test
For the Workstation
As root run the curl command supplied to you from the Chef Download page. For me it was…
curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | bash
Once this completes do this to test the install and see the version number:
chef-client -v
Now install GIT…
yum install git
(This will install version 1.7.1-ish)
From here as my own user I went to my home directory and cloned down the Chef GIT repo:
git clone git://github.com/opscode/chef-repo.git
Next cd into the chef-repo dir and create your .chef folder. This folder will hold your authorization files in a few steps from now.
cd chef-repo mkdir .chef
Add your .chef to the .gitignore file so it and its contents will not be uploaded.
echo .chef >> .gitignore
Get the .pem files and knife.rb files
You will need to copy these files from the chefserver that you previously setup. These files essentially give you access to connect to the server via chef-client and with knife. For me the command run from my workstation was…
sudo scp root@192.168.1.152:/etc/chef-server/admin.pem /home/seth/chef-repo/.chef/admin.pem sudo scp root@192.168.1.152:/etc/chef-server/chef-validator.pem /home/seth/chef-repo/.chef/chef-validator.pem
You then want to run the knife initial command to create the knife.rb file in your .chef folder. Unless you know the hostname of your server and the locations of your admin and chef-validator.pem files this step will fail. You also need to make sure that port 443 is open on your server. You can do that with this:
sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT sudo service iptables save
Now do this:
knife configure --initial
Here is what my output looked like to give you an idea of what to expect:
[seth@chefworkstation001 .chef]$ knife configure --initial Overwrite /home/seth/.chef/knife.rb? (Y/N)y Please enter the chef server URL: [https://chefworkstation001.devopshomelab:443] https://192.168.1.152:443 Please enter a name for the new user: [seth] Please enter the existing admin name: [admin] Please enter the location of the existing admin's private key: [/etc/chef-server/admin.pem] /home/seth/chef-repo/.chef/admin.pem Please enter the validation clientname: [chef-validator] Please enter the location of the validation key: [/etc/chef-server/chef-validator.pem] /home/seth/chef-repo/.chef/chef-validator.pem Please enter the path to a chef repository (or leave blank): Creating initial API user... Please enter a password for the new user: Created user[seth] Configuration file written to /home/seth/.chef/knife.rb
Once you successfully make it past this point you should be good to go. You can test your configuration and connectivity to your server by running the following two commands:
knife client list
knife user list
Now lets bootstrap our new chef workstation
On the server you will need to configure knife like we did on the client side so do:
sudo knife configure -i
You will see something similar to what we saw the firwst time we ran this. Here is my output…
WARNING: No knife configuration file found Where should I put the config file? [/root/.chef/knife.rb] Please enter the chef server URL: [https://chefserver.devopshomelab:443] Please enter a name for the new user: [seth] chefserver Please enter the existing admin name: [admin] Please enter the location of the existing admin's private key: [/etc/chef-server/admin.pem] Please enter the validation clientname: [chef-validator] Please enter the location of the validation key: [/etc/chef-server/chef-validator.pem] Please enter the path to a chef repository (or leave blank): Creating initial API user... Please enter a password for the new user: Created user[chefserver] Configuration file written to /root/.chef/knife.rb
If you have everything configured correctly you can now bootstrap your workstation by running the following command:
sudo ./knife bootstrap 192.168.1.153 --sudo -x seth -N "chefworkstation001"
You should have successfully installed and configured a working Chef open server and workstation following these steps. If you have questions or comments please feel free to use the comment section below. As always you can also consult the official Chef documentation on this subject by going here:
SERVER: http://docs.opscode.com/install_server.html
WORKSTATION: http://docs.opscode.com/install_workstation.html
Also check out my other post about bootstrapping a node in your new Chef environment. HERE
