Working with Chef

For single user setups, chef-solo is a version of the chef-client that allows you to use Chef without requiring access to a server. Chef-solo runs locally and requires that a cookbook and any of its dependencies be present on the node being managed. As a result, chef-solo provides a limited subset of the full chef server mode of operation. Most of the features that chef-solo is missing revolve around search and centralized data management, which are not critical for managing virtual machines or a small collection of nodes. The installation and maintenance is simple, but the feature set is smaller.

Installing the Chef server will give you access to the full set of Chef functionality. This mode requires access to a Linux-based host ...

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