Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook - Second Edition

Developing recipes with local mode

If running your own Chef server seems like an overkill and you're not comfortable with using the hosted Chef, you can use local mode to execute cookbooks.

Getting ready

1. Create a cookbook named my_cookbook by running the following command:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ chef generate cookbook cookbooks/my_cookbook
   

   Compiling Cookbooks...
   Recipe: code_generator::cookbook
   ...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...

2. Edit the default recipe of my_cookbook so that it creates a temporary file:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl cookbooks/my_cookbook/recipes/default.rb
   

   file "/tmp/local_mode.txt" do
       content "created by chef client local mode"
   end

How to do it...

Let's run my_cookbook on your local workstation using Chef client's local mode:

1. Run the Chef client ...