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Questions tagged [chef]

Chef is an open source configuration management framework for infrastructure automation.

Chef is an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure. You write source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built, then apply those descriptions to your servers. The result is a fully automated infrastructure: when a new server comes on line, the only thing you have to do is tell Chef what role it should play in your architecture.

More information can be found in the Documentation.

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Why use Chef/Puppet over shell scripts?

New to Puppet and Chef tools. Seems like the job that they are doing can be done with shell scripting. Maybe it was done in shell scripts until these came along. I would agree they are more readable. But, are there any other advantages over shell…
resting
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Relationship between Vagrant, Docker, Chef and OpenStack (or similar products)?

I am a web developer, but I am also interested in a few administrative tasks. Hence, the new move from pure administration to dev-ops comes handy for me. Anyway, I have some problems to put a few things into a relationship. Maybe there isn't any, so…
Golo Roden
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Puppet vs Chef, pro and contra from users and use cases

I already googled and read the "to-puppet-or-to-chef-that-is-the-question" article. I'm interested in use cases, real world implementations in which people had choosen one or the other on real problems bases. I'm particularly interested in…
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Chef best Practices/Questions

I use and love Puppet. I moved to a new company and they are adopting Chef. So I'm trying to learn Chef but am having a hard time piecing it all together because I still think in Puppet =) These are my questions: Is it better to setup roles in…
rizen
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What advantages/features does Puppet or Chef offer over Salt (or vice versa)?

I am looking at rolling out a new configuration management tool to replace our home-grown solution. The defacto standards are Chef and Puppet, both of which are Ruby-centric (though can be used to deploy non-Ruby environment, obviously). The vast…
jamieb
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Do chef and puppet cost money?

I intend to use chef or puppet to do administration (I'm thinking more of chef as it's younger and I get a better feeling about it). In both home pages I saw there is an "enterprise edition" that costs money and I don't intend to buy anything. What…
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What are the benefits of running chef-server instead of chef-solo?

I am looking at automated deployment solutions for my team and have been playing with Chef for the past few days. I've been able to get a simple web app up an running from a base Red Hat VM using chef-solo. Our end goal is to use Chef (or another…
linusthe3rd
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How to find the Chef environment in a recipe?

I want to run a cookbook_file resource only if the current environment is "dev". How can this be expressed? The documentation suggests this: In a recipe, a code block like this would be useful: qa_nodes = search(:node,"chef_environment:QA") …
Steve Bennett
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Are configuration management tools (Puppet, Chef) capable of keeping installed packages up to date?

This is probably a simple question for those of you already running configuration management tools. Are configuration management tools such as Puppet or Chef the right approach for keeping installed packages up to date? Suppose I run a number of…
daff
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How to automate changed config files during apt-get upgrade in Ubuntu 12

I like to use "knife cloudstack server create ..." to build a new VM. My bootstrap template starts off with an "apt-get update" and "apt-get -y upgrade". The upgrade then halts with: 10.190.113.11 Configuration file `/etc/nscd.conf' 10.190.113.11 …
Mojo
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Configuration management: push versus pull based topology

The more established configuration management (CM) systems like Puppet and Chef use a pull-based approach: clients poll a centralized master periodically for updates. Some of them offer a masterless approach as well (so, push-based), but state that…
Willem
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What are the pros and cons of AWS Elastic Beanstalk compared with other deployment strategies?

I'm pretty new to the whole Netflix OSS stack and deployments in general. As a background for my current level of knowledge ops-wise, my main role is as a front-end application engineer. However, I enjoy the operations side of things, so I'm…
James van Dyke
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Is there a more elegant way to remotely run chef-client?

This is the way recommended in the Chef Fast Start tutorial: knife ssh name:mynode -a ipaddress -x ubuntu -i mycredentials.pem "sudo chef-client" This is really clumsy. Is there really not a better way, or is the idea that in a real production…
Steve Bennett
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How to set ulimits for a service starting at boot?

I need, for mysql to use large-pages, to set a ulimit - I've done this in limits.conf. However, limits.conf (pam_limits.so), doesn't get read in for init, only for "real" shells. I solved this before by adding a "ulimit -l" to the initscript start…
jayofdoom
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Best practice for testing chef recipes?

My team has created a large number of chef cookbooks. I was wondering what methods and frameworks I should look into so we can start creating tests to assure that our nodes are configured properly?
linusthe3rd
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