develop.md

Develop with ChefZero

Prerequisites

1. Open a cmder session
2. Install chefdk chocolatey package : Chef development kit

$ choco install chefdk -y

Setting up Chef knife to work locally with ChefZero

Knife is an essential tool in the chef workflow. However it requires some configuration to be able to use it for local development against a ChefZero server.

Positioned at the Repo root, cd into the chef directory and then execute the knife-init.bat command.

$ cd chef
$ knife-init

Running the Chef Cookbook locally with ChefZero

Positioned at the Repo root, cd into the chef directory and then execute the run.bat command. This will run the cookbooks/mybook default recipe.

$ cd chef
$ run

If you want to run a specific recipe append the -o flag to the run command as follows:

$ run -o mybook::specific_recipe

Debugging

To run in debug mode append the options -l debug to the command. We can use tee to redirect the STDOUT to a log file.

$ run -l debug | tee logs.ignore.txt

Other topics

Ways to create cookbooks

• berks cookbook cookbooks/mynewbook: gives a complete folder structure
• chef generate cookbook cookbooks/mynewbook: adds kitchen, tests and other folders

How to work with Berkshelf

• http://comtechies.com/how-to-manage-chef-cookbooks-with-berkshelf.html
• https://docs.chef.io/berkshelf.html