The anatomy of a Chef run

A Chef run here implies either the execution of chef-client or chef-solo, and we'll look at each of them separately.

A Chef run using chef-client

As we learned earlier while understanding terminology, a chef-client is an agent that runs on machines that are meant to be configured using Chef. The chef-client agent is meant to be executed in an environment where we are using Chef in a client-server architecture.

Upon the invocation of a chef-client, the following things happen:

  • Ohai is executed and automatic attributes are collected, which are eventually used to build a node object
  • Authentication with a chef-server
  • Synchronization of cookbooks
  • Loading of cookbooks and convergence
  • Checking for the status of chef-client run, reporting, ...

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