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Chef Server 12
// Mischa Taylor's Coding Blog

The source code for this article can be found at https://github.com/learningchef/learningchef-code/tree/master/chefserver12.

Make sure you install the latest Chef Development Kit 0.3.5 (or higher) and/or Chef Client 11.18 (or higher) before trying to run knife commands against Chef Server 12. It appears that some changes were made to the clients for administrators to work with Chef Server 12, so these newer versions (at the time of this writing) are required that came out since the Learning Chef book was published.

Introduction

In the Learning Chef book we cover Chef Server 11 in Chapters 9 and 10, as that was the version of Chef Server available when we were writing the book. Since then, Chef Server 12 has been released. This blog post covers how the material presented in Chapter 9 can be adapted for Chef Server 12. No changes are needed in Chapter 10 for Chef Server 12.

Chef Server 12 merges the code bases for what were three separate flavors of Chef Server:

Open Source Chef Server
On-Premises Enterprise Chef
Hosted Enterprised Chef

Also the pricing for Chef Server has changed as well to match. For more information on the changes, refer to Chef plans and pricing.

From a technical standpoint, the great thing about Chef Server 12 is that is now shares the same core, whether or not you choose to use what used to be the open source option or you pay for a subscription to take advantage of Chef Server's Premium features.

Installing Chef Server 12 Manually

To install Chef Server, go to https://downloads.getchef.com/ and click on the "Get It" button, as shown in the following screenshot:

[Get Chef Server 12]

From there, you are presented with a download link page where you can choose to download Chef Server 12. Chef Server 12 currently provides install packages for both the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu Linux platforms (sorry, no Windows support for the server piece, only for Windows clients):

[Download Chef Server 12]

To manually replicate a basic Chef Server install in a cookbook, we first need to download the Chef Server 12 install package for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, as we'll be installing on CentOS 6.5. To match what is being written in this article, use version 12.0.0. Use the Copy Link Address option on the download link to copy the full download URl to your clipboard.

Here's the rest of the steps necessary to install Chef Server:

Install the chef-server package.
Run sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure.

NOTE: The name of the command line application to configure Chef Server has changed from private-chef-ctl to chef-server-ctl with version 12.

Install Chef Server 12

Assuming you have sufficient resources to install Chef Server 12 locally along with a test node, let's create a chef-server cookbook that will install Chef Server 12. To maintain consistency with Hosted Enterprise Chef, create the directory chef-repo/cookbooks and create the chef-server cookbook in that directory. Having a top-level chef-repo directory will help you handle the additional files necessary to manage Chef Server 12 beyond the cookbooks themselves. You'll definitely be using more than one cookbook in your organization, so we suggest putting them in a chef-repo/coobkooks subdirectory.

Create the chef-repo/cookbooks directory and make it the current working directory.

Linux/Mac OS X:

$ mkdir -p chef-repo/cookbooks  $ cd chef-repo/cookbooks

Windows:

> mkdir chef-repo\cookbooks  > cd chef-repo\cookbooks

Then generate the chef-server cookbook with chef generate cookbook or knife cookbook create, dependening on whether you are using the Chef Development Kit or Chef Client. We're going to go through the cookbook creation steps quickly in this article. If you need a refresher on what each of these commands mean and the expected output, refer to Chapter 7 of the Learning Chef book.

Chef Development Kit:

$ chef generate cookbook chef-server  $ cd chef-server

Chef Client:

$ knife cookbook create chef-server --cookbook-path .  $ cd chef-server  $ kitchen init --create-gemfile  $ bundle install

As shown in the code example below, edit the .kitchen.yml file to use the CentOS 6.5 basebox we prepared specifically for the Learning Chef book. Also assign a private network address like we did in Chapter 7 of Learning Chef. This time we're going to use the IP address 192.168.38.34. If this conflicts with an address already being used on your local network. change it to a nonconflicting one. We also need more memory than the default 512 MB allocated, so add a customize: block with a memory: statement to increase the memory to 1.5 GB (memory is specified in megabytes only).

NOTE: We also changed the suite name to server as we'll be logging in to the virtual machine with Chef Server 12. This makes it more clear that the examples should be run on the Chef Server machine.

Generate a default attributes file in attributes/default.rb.

Chef Development Kit:

$ chef generate attribute default

Chef Client:

$ touch attributes/default.rb

Add an attribute specifying the download URL for the Chef Server package that you obtained from the download link page. We recommend using the 12.0.0 version URL as shown below, as we wrote the exampels for this article using this Version of Chef Server.

From here, we're just going to skip ahead to the final bit of code in the "Introducing Idempotence" section of Chapter 9 in Learning Chef, as everything remains the same for Chef Server 12. The only difference is the command line app for configuring Chef Server is now called chef-server-ctl instead of private-server-ctl. Refer to Chapter 9 in Learning Chef for more explanation on what this code does.

Try running kitchen converge against this recipe, and note that it reports 0/2 resources updated, which is the result we are looking for; no resources are updated after running kitchen converge for the second time:

$ kitchen converge  -----> Starting Kitchen (v1.2.1)  -----> Converging <default-centos65>...  ...  Converging 3 resources         Recipe: chef-server::default           * remote_file[/tmp/kitchen/cache/chef-server-core-12.0.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm] action create[2014-11-26T01:27:20+00:00] INFO: Processing remote_file[/tmp/kitchen/cache/chef-server-core-12.0.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm] action create (chef-server::default line 11)          (up to date)           * package[chef-server-core-12.0.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm] action install[2014-11-26T01:27:27+00:00] INFO: Processing package[chef-server-core-12.0.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm] action install (chef-server::default line 15)          (up to date)           * execute[reconfigure-chef-server] action nothing[2014-11-26T01:27:28+00:00] INFO: Processing execute[reconfigure-chef-server] action nothing (chef-server::default line 22)          (skipped due to action :nothing)         [2014-11-26T01:27:28+00:00] INFO: Chef Run complete in 7.811144016 seconds           Running handlers:         [2014-11-26T01:27:28+00:00] INFO: Running report handlers         Running handlers complete         [2014-11-26T01:27:28+00:00] INFO: Report handlers complete         Chef Client finished, 0/2 resources updated in 10.600168629 seconds         Finished converging <default-centos65> (0m12.49s).  -----> Kitchen is finished. (0m13.51s)

Always check your recipes to see if they are idempotent before deploying them to production. If we had deployed the first version of this recipe in production, given that the chef-client usually runs on a periodic timer performing Chef runs, all our nodes would have been reinstalling the Chef Server package and reconfiguring the server every 30 minutes!

Configure Chef Server

The configuration of Chef Server has changed considerably with Chef Server 12. Now, the server does not enable a web UI by default, and you are expected to configure the Chef Server primarily through the command line.

You need to perform two actions in order to configure Chef Server 12:

Create an admin user
Create an organization

Both of these actions are now chef-server-ctl subcommands: user-create and org-create respectively.

NOTE: You may be tempted to skip ahead and install the management UI and try to configure an admin user/organization in the web UI, just like you did with Chef Server 11. Unfortunately this approach does not work with version 12.0.0. You must create one admin user and an initial organization on the command line first, then you can create the rest in the web UI.

The chef-server-ctl user-create command is used to create a user The help for the command usage follows. As of this writing the help mistakenly displays usage for the legacy knife opc user create command, but it is really now supposed to be chef-server-ctl user-create:

USAGE: knife opc user create USERNAME FIRST_NAME [MIDDLE_NAME] LAST_NAME EMAIL PASSWORD  -f, --filename FILENAME          Write private key to FILENAME rather than STDOUT

The chef-server-ctl org-create command is used to create an organization. The help for the command usage follows. It currently has a similar issue with the help referencing the legacy command, similar to user-create:

USAGE: knife opc org create ORG_SHORT_NAME ORG_FULL_NAME (options)  -f, --filename FILENAME          Write validator private key to FILENAME rather than STDOUT

In both cases, use the --filename parameter to write the *.pem files containing the user and organization keys. By default, they are just echoed to STDOUT.

Login to the server-centos65 instance to create the first admin user and the first organization. I created an admin user for myself, just like I did in Chapter 9 of Learning Chef. Here's the results of the commands I ran:

$ kitchen login server-centos65  Last login: Wed Nov 26 01:59:12 2014 from 10.0.2.2  Welcome to your Packer-built virtual machine.  [vagrant@server-centos65 ~]$ sudo chef-server-ctl user-create misheska Mischa Taylor mischa@misheska.com chefrocks --filename misheska.pem  ...  [vagrant@server-centos65 ~]$ sudo chef-server-ctl org-create learningchef "Learning Chef" --association misheska --filename learningchef-validator.pem  ...  [vagrant@server-centos65 ~]$ ls *.pem  learningchef-validator.pem  misheska.pem  [vagrant@server-centos65 ~]$ exit  logout  Connection to 127.0.0.1 closed.

NOTE: You'll need sudo or root access to run the user-create and org-create commands, because they need access to the default superuser key owned by root. This key is located in /etc/opscode/pivotal.pem.

After you have created the <username>.pem and <organization>-validator.pem files to the chef-repo/.chef directory on your host. One way to do this is to use the scp command to copy the files. Here's what I did to create these files on my host after making chef-repo the current working directory:

$ mkdir .chef  $ scp -o stricthostkeychecking=no vagrant@192.168.38.34:/home/vagrant/misheska.pem .chef/misheska.pem  vagrant@192.168.38.34's password: vagrant  $ scp -o stricthostkeychecking=no vagrant@192.168.38.34:/home/vagrant/learningchef-validator.pem .chef/learningchef-validator.pem  vagrant@192.168.38.34's password: vagrant

For the initial organization, you'll need to create your own knife.rb file by hand. Here's the knife.rb file I used:

The chef_server_url field in the knife.rb uses a fake DNS hostname of server-centos65.vagrantup.com because that's the hostname vagrant set up. If you try to visit the URL https://server-centos65.vagrantup.com/organization/learningchef, you will discover that it is not valid.

Chef Server requires that hosts have valid fully qualified domain names set up in your local domain name service (DNS). In production, you would have your Chef Server hosntame configured in your Domain Name System (DNS) server before installing Chef Server. Let's add a temporary host entry for server-centos65.vagrantup.com in your local host database in lieu of making a DNS change, as we are just doing a book exercose.

Run one of the following commands to add a host entry. Following are the commands I ran on my machine. If you used an IP address other than 192.168.38.34, make sure it matches when you run the command.

Linux/Mac OS X:

$ sudo sh -c "echo '192.168.38.34 server-centos65.vagrantup.com' >> /etc/hosts"

Windows Command Prompt:

> echo 192.168.38.34 server-centos65.vagrantup.com >> %WINDIR%\System32\Drivers\Etc\Hosts

Windows PowerSHell:

PS> ac -Encoding UTF8 $env:windor\system32\drivers\etc\hosts "192.168.38.34 server-centos65.vagrantup.com"

Now if you try to visit https://default-centos65.vagrantup.com in your web browser, your local host should think that this is a valid hostname.

Testing the Connection

You should run the following commands from inside the Chef repository. Open your termianl or command prompt, and make chef-repo the current working directory. If you placed your chef-repo in a different location, use that instead:

$ cd ~/chef-repo

Now you can use knife, the command-line tool for Chef Server, to test your connection and authentication against Chef Server. At the time of this writing, Chef does not provide a "connection test" command. However, asking Chef Server to list the clients will very

Your network can connect to Chef Server.
The authentication files are in the correct location.
The authentication files can be read by Chef.
The response from Chef Server is received by your workstation.

Issue the knife client list command on your terminal. You should see the following:

$ knife client list  learningchef-validator

If you get an error, checking the following:

You can access https://server-centos65.vagrantup.com:443 from a web browser.
You are running commands from inside the chef-repo directory.
The .chef directory contains two .pem files and a knife.rb.
Your authentication fiels have the correct file permissions (they should be only user-readable).
You are using the Chef Development Kit 0.3.5 and/or chef-client 11.18.0 (or higher). These tools needed some updates to work properly with Chef Server 12.

If you have confirmed the preceding steps and are still unable to connect to Chef Server, please consult the Chef online documentation.

From this point forward, the steps for bootstrapping a node are the same as with Chef Server 11. Refer to the "Bootstrapping a Node" section in Chapter 9 of Learning Chef for more information.

Installing the web UI

The web UI is now a premium feature of Chef Server. It is not installed by default. To install the web UI on your Chef Server, run the following commands to install the opscode-manage plugin and reconfigure both the web UI configuration and the Chef Server configuration to use the web UI:

$ cd cookbooks/chef-server  $ kitchen login  Last login: Wed Nov 26 04:09:56 2014 from 10.0.2.2  Welcome to your Packer-built virtual machine.  [vagrant@server-centos65 ~]$ sudo chef-server-ctl install opscode-manage  ...  [vagrant@server-centos65 ~]$ sudo opscode-manage-ctl reconfigure  ...  [vagrant@server-centos65 ~]$ sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure  ...  [vagrant@server-centos65 ~]$ exit  logout  Connection to 127.0.0.1 closed.

Once you have configured Chef Server to use the web UI, vist https://server-centos65.vagrantup.com. You should see something resembling the following screenshot. Since you already created an admin account, click on the Click here to sign in link:

[Click to sign in]

Clicking on the link will take you to https://server-centos65.vagrantup.com/login where you can sign in with your administrator account, as shown in the following:

[Sign in]

From there, you can access the management UI for Chef Server 12!

[Sign in]

Conclusion

This blog post covered all the relevant changes needed to adapt the material presented in Chapter 9 of the Learning Chef book for Chef Server 12. Thankfully, besides the server configuration steps, not much changed.

In addition to the material presented in this article, you might want to consider automating the creation of the admin user and organization in your Chef cookbook. To see how this might be done, take a look at the Chef cookbook I use to demo Chef Server 12 for clients at https://github.com/misheska-cookbooks/chef-server12.

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