Overview

Every Chef installation needs a Chef Repository. This is the place where cookbooks, roles, config files and other artifacts for managing systems with Chef will live. We strongly recommend storing this repository in a version control system such as Git and treat it like source code.

While we prefer Git, and make this repository available via GitHub, you are welcome to download a tar or zip archive and use your favorite version control system to manage the code.

Repository Directories

This repository contains several directories, and each directory contains a README file that describes what it is for in greater detail, and how to use it for managing your systems with Chef.

certificates/ - SSL certificates generated by rake ssl_cert live here.
code_generator/ - Cookbook for use with chef generate; see below.
config/ - Contains the Rake configuration file, rake.rb.
data_bags/ - Store data bags and items in .json in the repository.
environments/ - Contains chef environment files.
roles/ - Store roles in .rb or .json in the repository.
site-cookbooks/ - Cookbooks that you've created and are keeping in this repository

Configuration

The repository uses a configuration file, .chef/knife.rb which is a repository-specific configuration file for knife. If you're using the Opscode Platform, you can download one for your organization from the management console. If you're using the Open Source Chef Server, you can generate a new one with knife configure. For more information about configuring Knife, see the Knife documentation.

This particular repository comes with a slightly UMTS specific .chef/knife.rb file. It expects the following things:

That your chef server username is the same as either your local username or the value of the CHEF\_SERVER\_USER environment variable (set this in your profile somewhere if neccisary).
That your orgname (OpsCode Platform only) is either "umts" or set in the ORGNAME environment variable
That your client key is stored in ~/.chef/username.pem (where "username" is your chef server username mentioned above)
That your validation key is stored in ~/.chef/orgname-validator.pem

ChefDK

We recommend use of chef-dk, and as such the .ruby\_version in this repository is set to "system". If you have direnv installed, it will use the .envrc in this repo to set up your PATH and various GEM\_SOMETHING environment variables to work propperly with chef-dk.

Berkshelf

Cookbook dependencies are manged using berkshelf. This is different than a typical chef-repo where the cookbooks/ directory typically contains your cookbooks. Instead, you specify their location and version constraints in the Berksfile. and then use berks install to put them in you berkshelf. This is located in ~/.berkshelf/cookbooks by default if you're interested in poking around.

It is possible to store cookbooks in this repository; that's what the site-cookbooks directory is for. However, that directory is not in the cookbook_path. If you add a cookbook there, also add it to the Berksfile with a path: specification.

Note that, in general, the way we organize our cookbooks is to have one cookbook per git repository.

Also use berkshelf to upload cookbooks: berks upload [COOKBOOKS]

Next Steps