Learning Chef

Chapter 6. Manage Nodes with Chef Client

Now that you have a sandbox environment in which to experiment with Chef, let’s set up your guest system to be managed by Chef. In this chapter, you will use Test Kitchen to install Chef Client on your guest virtual machine so it can run Chef recipes. As a reminder, in Chapter 4 you learned that a Chef recipe is a file that contains Chef code.

What Is a Node?

Before we show you how to install Chef Client on the guest with Test Kitchen, let’s first introduce some Chef-specific terminology to describe the different types of machines that we are now using.

The machine on which you author Chef code is referred to as the Chef Developer’s Workstation or Chef Administrator’s Workstation. Your host machine is your Chef Developer Workstation. In Chapter 2 you installed the Chef Development Kit on your host so that you have all the tools necessary to write Chef recipes using a programmer’s editor and to manage changes to your Chef code with a source control system.

A machine that is managed by Chef is called a node. A machine is managed by Chef when it runs Chef recipes to ensure the machine is in a desired configuration, as shown in Chapter 4. A node can be a physical machine, a virtual machine, a cloud instance, or a container instance—it makes no difference to Chef. As long as the node has Chef Client installed, it can be managed by Chef and it can run Chef recipes.

Because the Chef Development Kit is a superset of Chef Client, you could ...