Using knife

knife_basics.md

Using Knife

Basic configuration

• Basic knife configuration

How to knife the chef

• Uploading cookbooks

  knife cookbook upload -a

  Will upload all cookbooks
• Updating cookbooks from source

  knife cookbook site vendor cookbook_name # e.g. jenkins

• Adding roles

  knife role from file path/filename.ext #e.g. roles/jenkins_node.json

Checking the diff between chef and local repository

Using the knife-essentials gem enables us to check the diff of cookbooks, roles, definitions, etc.

Usage:
knife diff cookbooks/name

Installing cookbooks from scratch

• Installing a cookbook found on gitbhub. Using this gem 'knife-github-cookbooks'. If the repo was https://github.com/fnichol/chef-jenkins

  knife cookbook github install fnichol/chef-jenkins

• Installing cookbooks from http://community.opscode.com/. If the cookbook was runit

  knife cookbook site install runit

Managing nodes

• Delete instance from AWS and node/client from chef

  knife ec2 server delete i-be7e6fc3 -N "Jenkins-Node-030" --purge

• List instances

  knife ec2 server list

• add role or recipe to all nodes

    for n in \`knife node list`; do 
      knife node run_list add $n 'role[lpos_default]'
    done

• Run arbitrary command on boxes with role

  knife ssh -xubuntu "role:jenkins_agent" "sudo chef-client"

• Run arbitrary command on all nodes

  knife ssh -xubuntu "name:*" "sudo chef-client"

• Get last number of Jenkins node

  knife node list | grep Jenkins-Node- | tail -n1 | cut -d '-' -f3

• Delete all the jenkins agents

    for node in $(knife search node "ohai_time:[* TO $(date -v-16H +%s)]" -i); do 
      knife client delete $node
      knife node delete $node
    done

• delete all nodes

    for node in `knife ec2 server list | grep 'i-' | cut -d ' ' -f 1`; do 
      knife ec2 server delete $node --purge -y
    done