Setting Up a Chef Master Node and Configuring a Node

In DevOps, configuration management tools play a crucial role in automating and managing infrastructure. Chef is one of such powerful tool that enables you to define and automate the configuration of your systems. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through setting up a Chef master node and configuring worker nodes using a simple cookbook.

 Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have the following:

• An Ubuntu server for the Chef master node.

• An additional Ubuntu server to act as the node.

Chef Master Node Setup

1. Update System Packages

sudo apt update -y

2. Switch to Root User and Set Password

sudo su

passwd ubuntu

3. Enable Password Authentication for SSH

Edit the sshd_config file:

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Find the line PasswordAuthentication and change it to yes.

Save and exit the editor.

4. Restart and Enable SSH Service

systemctl restart sshd

systemctl enable sshd

systemctl status sshd

5. Install Chef Development Kit (ChefDK)

wget https://packages.chef.io/files/stable/chefdk/3.2.30/ubuntu/18.04/chefdk_3.2.30-1_amd64.deb

dpkg -i chefdk_3.2.30-1_amd64.deb

6. Create Chef Repository and Cookbook

mkdir repo

cd repo

mkdir cookbooks

cd cookbooks

chef generate cookbook sample

cd sample

tree

7. Install ‘tree’ for Directory Visualization

apt install tree

8. Create a Template for an HTML File

cd ..

chef generate template sample index.html

vi sample/templates/index.html.erb

Add your HTML content, save, and exit.

9. Create a Recipe for Apache and HTML File

cd ..

cd sample

cd recipes

vi default.rb

Insert the Chef recipe for Apache and HTML file, save, and exit.

package 'apache2'

service 'apache2' do

 action [:enable, :start]

end

file '/var/www/html/index.html' do

 content 'Hello world! How are you?'

end

10. Apply the Chef Recipe Locally

chef-apply default.rb

11. Upload Cookbook to Chef Server

knife cookbook upload sample

12. Additional Steps (Optional)

Copy Chef Starter Kit to Remote Server:

scp -i "devopsKP.pem" chef-starter.zip ubuntu@ec2-34-201-98-71.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/home/ubuntu

Copy Cookbook to Remote Server:

cp -rf chef-starter.zip /root

cp -rf chef-starter.zip /home/ubuntu/repo/cookbooks

Install Unzip (if not installed):

apt install unzip

Unzip Chef Starter Kit:

unzip chef-starter.zip

Copy Cookbook to Chef Repository:

cp -rf  sample chef-repo/cookbooks

Node Configuration

Bootstrap the Node

knife bootstrap 172.31.27.114 -N chef_node -x ubuntu -P book2 --sudo --run-list 'recipe[sample]'

Congratulations! You’ve successfully set up a Chef master node and configured a node using a simple cookbook. For more advanced configurations and management, explore the Chef documentation.