Chef Development Kit

Chef Development Kit (Chef DK) brings Chef and the development tools developed by the Chef Community together and acts as the consistent interface to this awesomeness. This awesomeness is composed of:

This repository contains the code for the chef command. The full package is built via the 'chefdk' project in omnibus-chef.

Installation

You can get the latest release of ChefDK from the downloads page.

On Mac OS X, you can also use homebrew-cask to install ChefDK.

Once you install the package, the chef-client suite, berks, kitchen, and this application (chef) will be symlinked into your system bin directory, ready to use.

Usage

For help with Berkshelf, Test Kitchen, ChefSpec or Foodcritic, visit those projects' homepages for documentation and guides. For help with chef-client and knife, visit the Chef documentation and Learn Chef.

The chef Command

Our goal is for chef to become a workflow tool that builds on the ideas of Berkshelf to provide an awesome experience that encourages quick iteration and testing (and makes those things easy) and provides a way to easily, reliably, and repeatably roll out new automation code to your infrastructure.

While we've got a long way to go before we reach that goal we do have some helpful bits of functionality already included in the chef command:

chef generate

The generate subcommand generates skeleton Chef code layouts so you can skip repetitive boilerplate and get down to automating your infrastructure quickly. Unlike other generators, it only generates the minimum required files when creating a cookbook so you can focus on the task at hand without getting overwhelmed by stuff you don't need.

The following generators are built-in:

  • chef generate app Creates an "application" layout that supports multiple cookbooks. This is a somewhat experimental compromise between the one-repo-per-cookbook and monolithic-chef-repo styles of cookbook management.

  • chef generate cookbook Creates a single cookbook.

  • chef generate recipe Creates a new recipe file in an existing cookbook.

  • chef generate attribute Creates a new attributes file in an existing cookbook.

  • chef generate template Creates a new template file in an existing cookbook. Use the -s SOURCE option to copy a source file's content to populate the template.

  • chef generate file Creates a new cookbook file in an existing cookbook. Supports the -s SOURCE option similar to template.

  • chef generate lwrp Creates a new LWRP resource and provider in an existing cookbook.

chef gem

chef gem is a wrapper command that manages installation and updating of rubygems for the Ruby installation embedded in the ChefDK package. This allows you to install knife plugins, Test Kitchen drivers, and other Ruby applications that are not packaged with ChefDK.

Gems are installed to a .chefdk directory in your home directory; any executables included with a gem you install will be created in ~/.chefdk/gem/ruby/2.1.0/bin. You can run these executables with chef exec, or use chef shell-init to add ChefDK's paths to your environment. Those commands are documented below.

chef verify

chef verify tests the embedded applications. By default it runs a quick "smoke test" to verify that the embedded applications are installed correctly and can run basic commands. As an end user this is probably all you'll ever need, but verify can also optionally run unit and integration tests by supplying the --unit and --integration flags, respectively.

WARNING: The integration tests will do dangerous things like start HTTP servers with access to your filesystem and even create users and groups if run with sufficient privileges. The tests may also be sensitive to your machine's configuration. If you choose to run these, we recommend to only run them on dedicated, isolated hosts (we do this in our build cluster to verify each build).

chef exec

chef exec <command> runs any arbitrary shell command with the PATH environment variable and the ruby environment variables (GEM_HOME, GEM_PATH, etc) setup to point at the embedded ChefDK omnibus environment.

chef shell-init

chef shell-init SHELL_NAME emits shell commands that modify your environment to make ChefDK your primary ruby. For more information to help you decide if this is desirable and instructions, see "Using ChefDK as Your Primary Development Environment" below.

Using ChefDK as Your Primary Development Environment

By default, ChefDK only adds a few select applications to your PATH and packages them in such a way that they are isolated from any other Ruby development tools you have on your system. If you're happily using your system ruby, rvm, rbenv, chruby or any other development environment, you can continue to do so. Just ensure that the ChefDK provided applications appear first in your PATH before any gem-installed versions and you're good to go.

If you'd like to use ChefDK as your primary Ruby/Chef development environment, however, you can do so by initializing your shell with ChefDK's environment.

To try it temporarily, in a new terminal session, run:

eval "$(chef shell-init SHELL_NAME)"

where SHELL_NAME is the name of your shell, (usually bash, but zsh is also common). This modifies your PATH and GEM_* environment variables to include ChefDK's paths (run without the eval to see the generated code). Now your default ruby and associated tools will be the ones from ChefDK:

which ruby
# => /opt/chefdk/embedded/bin/ruby

To add ChefDK to your shell's environment permanently, add the initialization step to your shell's profile:

echo 'eval "$(chef shell-init SHELL_NAME)"' >> ~/.YOUR_SHELL_PROFILE

Where YOUR_SHELL_PROFILE is ~/.bash_profile for most bash users, ~/.zshrc for zsh, and ~/.bashrc on Ubuntu.

Uninstallation Instructions

Mac OS X

You can uninstall Chef Development Kit on Mac using below commands:

# Remove the installed files
sudo rm -rf /opt/chefdk

# Remove the system installation entry
sudo pkgutil --forget com.getchef.pkg.chefdk

# Remove the symlinks under /usr/bin for Chef Development Kit
ls -la /usr/bin | egrep '/opt/chefdk' | awk '{ print $9 }' | sudo xargs -I % rm -f /usr/bin/%

Windows

You can use Add / Remove Programs on Windows to remove the Chef Development Kit from your system.

RHEL

You can use rpm to uninstall Chef Development Kit on RHEL based systems:

rpm -qa *chefdk*
yum remove <package>

Ubuntu

You can use dpkg to uninstall Chef Development Kit on Ubuntu based systems:

dpkg --list | grep chefdk # or dpkg --status chefdk

# Purge chefdk from the system.
# see man dkpg for details
dpkg -P chefdk