Learn Chef Windows

Set up

Install the chef-dk from https://downloads.chef.io/chef-dk/ Install git.

Use powershell as the shell, run as Administrator
Create a directory chef-repo at the root of the home directory and cd into it
Create recipes written in ruby to manage resources
Resources e.g. files have a default action, and recipes declare what state a resource should be in (but not how to achieve that state). In the sample recipe below, the default action for a file is :create so doesn’t need to be specifed in this instance.

file ‘C:\Users\Administrator\chef-repo\settings.ini’ do action :create content ‘greeting=hello world’ end
Use chef-apply <filename> to run a recipe directly
Resources are applied in the order in the recipe, so order is important
Actions are applied in the order stated, so order is important
Resource attributes are an example where order doesn’t matter

file ‘C:\temp\settings.ini’ do action :create mode ‘0755’ group ‘root’ owner ‘root’ end

Create a directory cookbooks and cd into it
Use chef generate cookbook <cookbookname> to create a new cookbook
Use tree /F to view the directory contents
Use chef generate template <cookbookname> <templatename> to create templates (e.g. index.html.erb), created under templates/default
Use chef generate template <cookbookname> <recipename> to create recipes
Use chef-client to run the cookbook

chef-client --local-mode --runlist 'recipe[cookbookname] # runs the default recipe in a cookbook chef-client --local-mode --runlist 'recipe[cookbookname::recipename] # to run a specific recipe chef-client -z -o <cookbookname>