Learning Chef

Glossary

Argument

See Parameter

Chef

a broad term for Opscode products including Chef Server (Erchef), Chef Client, Chef Solo, Hosted Chef, and Private (Enterprise) Chef; however, most commonly refers to Chef Client

Chef Client

the agent or service that runs locally on a machine managed by Chef

Chef Shell

formerly shef, the Chef Shell (chef-shell) is an interactive REPL for using Chef via the command line (similar to irb in Ruby or python in Python)

Chef Server

the centralized store for configuration data in your infrastructure

Chef Solo

an open source version of Chef that does not require Chef Server, but lacks some features that might be important to power users, such as search and centralized data

Client

See Chef Client

Convergent

See Convergence

Convergence

a stronger version of idempotency that guarantees the command will not be executed if action is not required

See also Idempotency

Cookbook

a single unit of configuration and policy information; an encapsulation of recipes, attributes, metadata, templates, files, and more

Domain Specific Language

a language or syntax written to handle a specific problem domain or set of concerns

DSL

See Domain Specific Language

Data Bag

a JSON key-value file that is used to file global organizational data such as users or API keys

Embedded Ruby

a Ruby templating language that lets you run Ruby and output the results; useful for configuration templates

Encrypted Data Bag

an AES-256-CBC encrypted version of a Data ...