sppdev

Troubleshooting a chef client/recipe

Debugging Chef with Shef

When the chef client fails to run the recipe successfully during bootstrapping sudo chef-client to setup the connection with the chef-server. It will run with an empty run list. After its connected login to http://yourchefserver.com:4040/nodes/_NODE_NAME_, add the roles/recipes to the chef-client and run sudo chef-client from the client again.

When fixing a recipe and re-running make your modifications run knife cookbook upload -a #or cookbook name from your dev machine and run sudo chef-client from the chef client.

When there are issues registering the client with the chef-server check that the chef-client name isn't already registered on the server under clients or nodes or that the client has not already been registered (see below)

sppdev

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

sppdev

### Chef Knife config example
# https://github.com/fnichol/chef-bootstrap-repo/blob/master/.chef/knife.rb
###

# Environment variables required:
# CHEF_SERVER_URL - IP or url of your chef server
# CHEF_USER       - Initial user
# AWS_ACCESS_KEY  - AWS Access ID found here https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/securityCredentials
# AWS_SECRET_KEY  - AWS Secrete key found in link above