Uses the Chef configuration management tool, specifically chef-solo to configure a remote server. This is the simplest way to get started with using Chef.

• apt-get install -y git-core

• cd /tmp

• git clone git://github.com/brightmix/chef-solo-bootstrap.git

• cd /tmp/chef-solo-bootstrap

• git submodule init

• git submodule update

• sh chef_bootstrap.sh

• set a fully qualified domain name in /etc/hosts (e.g. foo.brightmix.com)

• chef-solo -l debug -c config/solo.rb -j config/chef.json

• Make sure Chef is installed on the remote server you want to configure. See chef_bootstrap.rb to help.

• Modify config/chef.json to specify the recipes from the ‘cookbooks’ dir you want to run

• Run with ‘rake cook [email protected]’

When you run the ‘rake cook’ task it will:

• rsync this entire directory to the location specified in ‘REMOTE_CHEF_PATH’ in the Rakefile

• Run chef-solo on the remote machine using the config files in config/ and your cookbooks.

• Run the ‘test’ recipe which creates the dir ‘/tmp/foobarbaz’ on the remote machine.

• Sprinkles magic dust on your server…

Most of the ideas and code here was cribbed from probablyinteractive.com/2009/3/29/Amazon%20EC2%20+%20Chef%20=%20Mmmmm.html. Just updated to match my understanding of the most recent config. My thanks to the author for giving me an excellent headstart.