Tinychef

This is a simple tool to manage Chef Solo recipe without having to deal with knife command line tool. Tinychef is basically few lines of Ruby code wrapping shell scripts I used to run my chef recipes.

It aims to be just enough to:

automate node boostrapping just a little bit
run recipes on nodes, overriding the run list if necessary
make it easy to work with encrypted data bags

Installation

$ gem install tinychef

Usage

To create a tinychef compatible directory:

$ tinychef new [dirname]

This will create a new dirname folder with the following structure:

├── cookbooks
├── data_bags
├── imported_cookbooks
├── nodes
├── roles
└── vendor
└── solo.rb

Bootstrap a node

Node bootstrapping is up to you. You have to prepare your own script file for bootstrapping and put it in boot.sh. You can then let tinychef run it:

$ tinychef boot newnode.example.org

Run a node

$ tinychef run [email protected]

This command will look for a mynode.example.org.json file in nodes folder and execute the run list on that. Alternatively you can run:

$ tinychef run nodes/another_node.json [email protected]

If you want to override the run list defined in the node file, append a run list sequence:

$ tinychef run nodes/another_node.json [email protected] "recipe[mybook::myrecipe]"

If this command does not encounter problems, all files are removed from the remote host when it completes. If any error occurs, files from the remote host are not removed, you'll have to clean everything up.

Working with data bags

Tinychef assumes you will only work with encrypted data bags. In order to work with encrypted databags you have to create a secret.key file in your tinychef root folder.

$ tinychef key:generate

This command will generate a secret.key file. Keep it secure.

Databags must be placed under data_bags directory organized in folders reflecting the name of the recipe where the databag is used. You work on databags as plain ruby hash files, and then encrypt them when it's time to run the recipe or push everything to the remote.

$ tinychef bag:create myrecipe bag_name

This command will crete a file named data_bags/myrecipe/bag_name.rb. When you are done editing this file you can encrypt it.

$ tinychef bag:encrypt myrecipe bag_name

Encryption command will generate a json representation of the hash file. This json file is the one that will be moved to the remote host when running recipes.

Keeping data safe

In order to keep your working copy clean and secure, tinychef provides a couple of commands to password protect you secret.key file:

$ tinychef key:lock

will ask for a password and encrypt you key an secret.key.aes file. The reverse command is:

$ tinychef key:unlock

It's a good idea to leave your working copy safe by removing all plain hashes version of data_bags. You'll be always able to restore the ruby hash version of an encrypted data bag with the command:

$ tinychef bag:decrypt myrecipe bag_name

Contributing

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request