A while ago Chef Software announced that they would move all source code to the Apache 2.0 license (see announcement for details), which is something I welcome. Not so much welcomed by many was the fact that they also announced to stop “free binary distributions”. In the past you could freely download and use the core parts of their offering, if that was sufficient for your needs. What upset many people was that the heads-up period for this change was rather short and many answers were left open. It also did not help that naturally their web site held many references to the old model, so people were confused.

In the meantime it seems that Chef has loosened their position on binary distributions a bit. There is now a number of binaries that are available under the Apache 2.0 license and they can be found here. This means that you can use Chef freely, if you are willing to compromise on some features. Thanks a lot for this!

This post will describe what I did to set up a fresh Chef environment with only freely available parts. You need just two things to get started with Chef: the server and the administration & development kit. The latter goes by the name of ChefDK and can be installed on all machines on which development and administration work happens. It comes with various command line tools that allow you to perform the tasks needed.

Interestingly, you will find almost no references to ChefDK on the official web pages. Instead its successor “Chef Workstation” will be positioned as the tool to use. There is only one slight problem here: The latest free version is pretty old (v0.4.2) and did not work for me, as well as various other people. That was when I decided to download the latest free version of ChefDK and give it a try. It worked immediately and since I had not needed any of the additional features that come with Chef Workstation, I never looked back.

No GUI is part of those free components. Of course Chef offer such a GUI (web-based) which is named Chef Management Console. It is basically a wrapper over the server’s REST API. Unfortunately the Management Console is “free” only up to 25 nodes. For that reason, but also because its functionality is somewhat limited compared to the command line tools, I decided to not cover it here.

Please check the licenses by yourself, when you follow the instructions below. It is solely your own responsibility to ensure compliance.

Below you will find a description of what I did to get things up and running. If you have a different environment (e.g. use Ubuntu instead of CentOS) you will need to check the details for your needs. But overall the approach should stay the same.

Environment

The environment I will use looks like this

• Chef server: Linux VM with CentOS 7 64 bit (minimal selection of programs)
• Chef client 1: Linux VM like for Chef server
• Development and administration: Windows 10 Pro 64bit (v1909)

I am not sure yet whether I will expand this in the future. If you are interested, please drop a comment below.

Please check that your system meets the prerequisites for running Chef server.

Component Versions

The download is a bit tricky, since we don’t want to end up with something that falls under a commercial license. As of this writing (April 2020) the following component binaries are the latest that come under an Apache 2.0 license. I verified the latter by clicking at “License Information” underneath each of the binaries that I plan to use.

• Chef Infra Server: v12.19.31 (go here to check for changes)
• Chef DK: 3.13.1 (go here to check for changes)

As to the download method Chef offer various methods. Typically I would recommend to use the package manager of your Linux distribution, but this will likely cause issues from a license perspective sooner or later.

Server Installation and Initial Setup

So what we will do instead is perform a manual download by executing the following steps (they are a sub-set of the official steps and all I needed to do on my system):

• All steps below assume that you are logged in as root on your designated Chef server. If you use sudo, please adjust accordingly.
• Ensure required programs are installed
  yum install -y curl wget
• Open ports 80 and 443 in the firwall
  firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service http && firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service https && firewall-cmd --reload
• Disable SELinux
  setenforce Permissive
• Download install script from Chef (more information here)
  curl -L https://omnitruck.chef.io/install.sh > chef-install.sh
• Make install script executable
  chmod 755 chef-install.sh
• Download and install Chef server binary package: The RPM will end up somewhere in /tmp and be installed automatically for you. This will take a while (the download size is around 243 MB), depending on your Internet connection’s bandwidth.
  ./chef-install.sh -P chef-server -v "12.19.31"
• Perform initial setup and start all necessary components, this will take quite a while
  chef-server-ctl reconfigure
• Create admin user
  chef-server-ctl user-create USERNAME FIRSTNAME LASTNAME EMAIL 'PASSWORD' --filename USERNAME.pem
• Create organization
  chef-server-ctl org-create ORG_SHORT_NAME 'Org Full Name' --association-user USERNAME --filename ORG_SHORT_NAME-validator.pem
• Copy both certificates (USERNAME.pem and ORG_SHORT_NAME-validator.pem) to your Windows machine. I use FileZilla (installers without bloatware can be found here) for such cases.

ChefDK Installation and Initial Setup

What I describe below is a condensed version of what worked for me. More details can be found on the official web pages.

• I use $HOME in the context below to refer to the user’s home directory on the Windows machine.  You must manually translate it to the correct value (e.g. C:\Users\chris in my case).
• Download the latest free version of ChefDK for Windows 10 from here and install it
• Check success of installation by running the following command from a command prompt:
  chef -v
• Create directory and base version of configuration file for connectivity by running
  knife configure (it may look like it hangs, just give it some time)
• Copy USERNAME.pem and SHORTNAME-validator.pem to $HOME/.chef
• Add your server’s certificate (self-signed!) to the list of trusted certificates with
  knife ssl fetch
• Verify that things work by executing knife environment list, it should return _default as the only existing environment
• The generated configuration file was named $HOME/.chef/credentials in my case and I decided to rename it config.rb (which is the new name in the official documentation) and also update the contents:
  • Remove the line with [default] at the beginning which seemed to cause issues
  • Add knife[:editor] = '"C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" -nosession -multiInst' as the Windows equivalent of setting the EDITOR environment variable on Linux.

Initial Project

We will  create a very simple project here

• Go into the directory where you want all your Chef development work to reside (I use $HOME/src; the comment regarding the use of $HOME from above still applies) and open a command prompt
• Create a new Chef repo (where all development files live)
  chef generate repo chef-repo (chef-repo is the name, you can of course change that)
• You will see that  a new directory ($HOME/src/chef-repo) has been created with a number of files in it. Among them is  ./cookbooks/example , which we will upload as a first test. Cookbooks are where instructions are stored in Chef.
• To be able to upload it, the cookbook path must be configured, so you need to add to $HOME/.chef/config.rb the following line:
         cookbook_path   ["$HOME/src/chef-repo/cookbooks"]
  (example:  cookbook_path ["c:/Users/chris/src/chef-repo/cookbooks"])
• You can now upload the cookbook via knife cookbook upload example

Client Setup

In order to have the cookbook executed you must now add it to the recipe list (they take the cooking theme seriously at Chef) of the machines, where you want it to run. But first you must bootstrap this machine for Chef.

• The bootstrap happens with the following command (I recommend to check all possible options by via knife bootstrap --help) executed on your Windows machine :
  knife bootstrap MACHINE_FQDN --node-name MACHINE_NAME_IN_CHEF --ssh-user root --ssh-password ROOT_PASSWORD
• You can now add the recipe to the client’s run-list for execution:
     knife node run_list add MACHINE_NAME_IN_CHEF example
  and should get a message similar to
    MACHINE_NAME_IN_CHEF :
    run_list:
      recipe[example]
• You can now check the execution by logging into your client and execute chef-client as root.  It will also be executed about every 30 minutes or so. But checking the result directly is always a good idea after you changed something.

Congratulation, you can now maintain your machines in a fully automated fashion!