Baker

A simple way to run chef recipes on one server.

Install

gem install baker --source http://gemcutter.org --no-ri --no-rdoc # sudo if you need to

Usage

I. setup ssh key

Set up your ssh key on the server so you can login into the box without a password. The gem only supports logging in via a .ssh/config shortcut. Your .ssh/config should look something like this:

Host server_name
  Hostname     xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
  Port         22  
  User         root

II. install chef on the server

Can install chef on the server by using baker.

$ bake --setup server_name

III. run chef recipes

Create a cookbooks project. Here's an example of a cookbooks project that can be used to install rails: https://github.com/tongueroo/cookbooks-rails

The cookbooks project structure looks like the following:

├── config
│   ├── node.json
│   └── solo.rb
└── cookbooks
    ├── example_recipe1
    │    └── recipes
    │        └── default.rb
    └── example_recipe2
        └── recipes
            └── default.rb

config/node.json and config/solo.rb are important. These are the configurations that get passed to the chef run that will tell it which recipes to run.

config/solo.rb looks like this:

file_cache_path "/tmp/baker"
cookbook_path "/tmp/baker/recipes/cookbooks"

config/node.json looks like this:

{
  "ec2": true,
  "environment": {"name":"production"},
  "mysql_root_password":"whatever",
  "packages":[
    {"name": "git-core"},
    {"name": "curl"}
  ],
  "gems":[
  	{"name": "rails", "version": "3.0.3"},
    {"name": "bundler"}
  ],
  "recipes":[
    "example_recipe1",
    "example_recipe2"
  ]
}

To actually run the chef recipes, cd into the cookbooks project folder and run this command:

$ bake server_name

After running chef you should check the /var/log/baker.chef.log on the server itself for possible errors.