The Chef Server acts as a hub for configuration data. The Chef Server stores cookbooks, the policies that are applied to cookbooks, and metadata that describes each registered node in the infrastructure. Nodes use the chef-client to ask the Chef Server for configuration details, such as recipes, templates, and file distributions. The chef-client then does as much of the configuration work as possible on the nodes themselves (and not on the Chef Server). This scalable approach distributes the configuration effort throughout the organization.
The steps below describe the process for installing Chef Server 11.x.
To install Chef Server 11.x, do the following:
Click the Chef Server tab.
Select the operating system, version, and architecture.
Select the version of Chef Server 11.x to download, and then click the link that appears to download the package.
Install the downloaded package using the correct method for the operating system on which Chef Server 11.x will be installed.
Configure Chef Server 11.x by running the following command:
$ sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure
This command will set up all of the required components, including Erchef, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, and all of the cookbooks that are used by chef-solo to maintain Chef Server 11.x.
Verify the installation of Chef Server 11.x by running the following command:
$ chef-server-ctl test
This will run the chef-pedant test suite against the installed Chef Server 11.x and will report back that everything is working and installed correctly.
From the workstation, verify the install by running the following commands to ensure that every chef-client and user was registered correctly.
$ knife client list
and:
$ knife user list