Debugging Chef client runs

Sometimes you get obscure error messages when running the Chef client and you have a hard time finding any clue about where to look for the error. Is your cookbook broken? Do you have a networking issue? Is your Chef server down? Only by looking at the most verbose log output do you have a chance to find out.

Getting ready

You need a Chef client hooked up to the hosted Chef or your own Chef server.

How to do it...

Let's see how we can ask the Chef client to print debug messages:

  1. Run the Chef-client with debug output:
    user@server:~$ sudo chef-client -l debug

    …TRUNCATED OUTPUT… [2014-12-27T21:38:34+00:00] DEBUG: Chef::HTTP calling Chef::HTTP::RemoteRequestID#handle_request [2014-12-27T21:38:34+00:00] DEBUG: Chef::HTTP calling ...

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