cafe

Cafe makes operating chef easy and delightful.

Chef is a world-class configuration management platform that, for many of us, is a gateway into automation that was previously unimaginable. However, like many of its siblings, it started out within a linux environment. As a result, running and maintaining it is not straightforward when you come from a Windows background.

Installation

Cafe is a standalone program that is fully operational by unzipping files into a folder and running cafe.exe. No ruby or .NET dependencies. It just works.

To install:

Unzip the installation package into a folder
Run cafe init if you want it added to the path (you'll need to reboot)
Run cafe service register to have the cafe server run in the background so it can do things for you

Runtime

Cafe is lightweight. To run the service it takes 17.8MB of memory and no CPU. This means that you can put cafe on all your nodes, then install and run chef as you want to.

Walkthrough

After installation, let's work on getting chef bootstrapped on the machine.

The first step is to download and install inspec:

cafe inspec download 1.7.1

Once the inspec installer is downloaded, let's install it:

cafe inspec install 1.7.1

Next we will do the same with the Chef Client:

cafe chef download 12.16.42

And then install it:

cafe chef install 12.16.42

Now that we've installed Chef, let's bootstrap it. You can do this two ways:

The Policyfile way:

cafe chef bootstrap policy: webserver group: qa config: C:\Users\mhedg\client.rb validator: C:\Users\mhedg\my-validator.pem

The Run List Way:

cafe chef bootstrap run-list: "[chocolatey::default]" config: C:\Users\mhedg\client.rb validator: C:\Users\mhedg\my-validator.pem

Both ways ask for a config file that will be your client.rb on the machine and a validator used to ask the chef server for validation.

Now that we've bootstrapped Chef, we can run it again on demand if we want to:

cafe chef run

We can even look at the logs directory and see that we have a rolling log that only has our chef-client runs in it. We can also see specific logging for our client and server.

We probably want to schedule Chef to run every 30 minutes or so. To do this we edit our server.json:

{
    "ChefInterval": 1800,
    "Port": 59320
}

And restart the cafe service:

cafe service restart

At some point you may even want to pause chef on the node so you can manually check a node's state without fear of Chef changing anything. To do this, run:

cafe chef pause

And then when you're ready to rejoin the land of sanity, you can simply run:

cafe chef resume

Running Remotely

You can either run cafe remotely through Powershell Remoting (where you invoke cafe as a locally run process) or by using the on: servername syntax at the end of commands above. You'll need to make sure you have networking set up for it if you go the latter route.

Other ideas

Here are some other ideas about what can be done with cafe from demos and discussions:

working with proxy servers during download
overridable download location for internal networks
include ETW on chef events
Trigger chef to run remotely (lightweight push job), and with orchestration events
All agents listen to a central server that provides direction on what to do
When chef crashes, let's retry running it to avoid downtime
Register an event with the process to say shut down if Azure needs to reconfigure the box - needs more discussion

Upgrading Cafe

The Simple Way

To upgrade cafe, simply stop the service with cafe service stop, copy all binaries into your cafe installation, then start the service with cafe service start.

The Complicated Way

The problem with this is that it's difficult to automate. If you try to automate this process from within cafe itself, it can't because it can't stop itself.

Enter the cafe.Updater. This application is completely separate from cafe and so can update it without endangering the cafe application itself.

Here's how it works:

cafe.Updater is installed with cafe itself in a folder called updater.
Run cafe.Updater as a service by running the commands cafe.Updater service register and cafe.Updater service start
Download a particular update of cafe by running cafe download 0.8.0. This will stage your cafe zip file in your local staging folder
Now run cafe install 0.8.0. This will:

Copy the cafe zip install file to the updater/staging folder
cafe.Updater will notice this file arrived and will start its update
cafe.Updater will wait 30 seconds so the install can finish replying back to its client
cafe.Updater stops the cafe service
cafe.Updater unzips the file to the parent directory (the cafe installation directory)
cafe.Updater starts the cafe service

[Note: this is not implemented yet.] To update the cafe.Updater itself, you'll need to follow these steps:

Run cafe updater download 0.8.0. This will be the cafe version and will stage the same exact file. In fact cafe download 0.8.0 and cafe updater 0.8.0 should do the same thing
Run cafe updater install 0.8.0. This will:

Unzip the cafe installation to a temporary location
Stop the cafe.Updater service by running cafe.Updater service stop
Copy all files from updater inside of the install package into the updater folder
Start the cafe.Updater service by running cafe.Updater service start

The Easy Way

[Note that this is currently in progress]

The cafe cookbook will handle all of this for you. In fact, this complexity exists so that you can manage cafe during a chef run while also avoiding updating yourself while you're running.

Development

Cafe is built with .NET Core SDK 1.0.3 using cake.

mhedgpeth/cafe