Chef Bootstrap Sample

This is a bootstrap guide to quickly use Chef. It's a simple web server that connects to a MySQL database in AWS. There will be 2 methods to deploy the application. The first is using a standard Chef or Hosted Chef server. The second is via Chef Solo or local mode.

Prerequisites

In your local machine, install the Chef DK. https://docs.chef.io/install_dk.html

Sign-up for a Hosted Chef account and create your own organization. Download the knife.rb file and ssh key then place it in the .chef folder.

Provision 2 AWS EC2 RHEL instances.

Make sure that one instance will have port 80 open, while the other has port 3306 open.

Deployment

Chef Server

Open the terminal and change the directory to the project folder. Run the following commands.

Install cookbook dependencies.

$ berks install
$ berks upload

Upload roles and environment:

$ knife role from file roles/*.json
$ knife environment from file environments/demo.json

Upload data_bags

$ knife upload data_bags

Upload cookbooks:

$ knife cookbook upload sqlserver
$ knife cookbook upload demo-app

Bootstrap sql server and web app server

$ knife bootstrap SQL_IP --ssh-user ec2-user --sudo --identity-file IDENTITY_FILE --node-name sql-server-1 --run-list 'role[sqlserver]'
$ knife bootstrap APP_IP --ssh-user ec2-user --sudo --identity-file IDENTITY_FILE --node-name demo-app-1 --run-list 'role[demo-app]'

Where: SQL_IP is the IP Address of the EC2 instance where port 3306 is open. APP_IP is the IP Address of the EC2 instance where port 80 is open. IDENTITY_FILE is a path to the EC2 .pem file.

Chef Solo

Add the IP Addresses to the corresponding files in the nodes folder.
Run the following commands:

$ chef-solo -c solo.rb -j nodes/sql-server-1.json
$ chef-solo -c solo.rb -j nodes/demo-app-1.json

Additional Work