The Scenario

We continue to utilize Chef in our organization’s infrastructure, and it’s time to create a cookbook that installs Nginx. Creating new web servers, for either production or internal testing, is fairly common. We’d like to be able to control the run-list for all web server nodes in a single place though, and we’ve decided that we will use a new role to do this. After we’ve written our Nginx cookbook, we’ll deploy it to the first web server node using a role.

Logging in

On the lab overview page, we’ll see three EC2 instances: a Chef server ( we’ll call it chef), a workstation (we’ll call it worker) and a node (we’ll call it node). The shell prompts in this lab guide will reflect which one we’re running commands in at the moment.

Get Nginx Running and Enabled on web-node1

We need to write a cookbook that installs the Nginx package and starts the service. This cookbook needs to be published and the recipe run on web-node1.

Create the Cookbook

After logging into worker, we can get into the provided Chef repository right away, with cd chef-repo. Once we’re in there, we can start building our cookbook:

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cloud_user@worker]$ chef generate cookbook cookbooks/nginx

Create the Recipe

Edit the file ./cookbooks/nginx/recipes/default.rb with whichever text editor you like. When we’re done, the file should read like this (after our additions, and once we’ve removed the comments that were sitting in there already):

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package "nginx"

service "nginx" do
  action [:enable, :start]
end

Loading Our Cookbook

If we run this:

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cloud_user@worker]$ knife upload cookbooks/nginx

and then this:

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cloud_user@worker]$ knife node list

we’ll see our web-node1 listed.

Create the webserver Role, and Ensure It Includes Nginx

We have to create a new role called webserver for installing Nginx and running the service. On this machine though, we don’t have a default editor set, so we’ll get an error if try we creating the role first. We’re going to set Vim here, and then create the role:

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cloud_user@worker]$ export EDITOR=vim
cloud_user@worker]$ knife role create webserver

Now we’ll land in Vim, editing some JSON. Make the run_list section look like this:

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...
"run_list": [
  "recipe[nginx]"
...

Use the webserver Role in the web-node1 Run-list

Let’s set the webserver role to this node:

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cloud_user@worker]$ knife node run_list add web-node1 'role[webserver]'

Now we can run our changes and push our cookbook up to the chef machine:

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cloud_user@worker]$ knife ssh 'name:web-node1' 'sudo chef-client'

We’ll be prompted for our password a couple of times (which will be the same as the cloud_user password we used for getting into the machine in the first place) and then we can watch the command output all of the things going on. As a sanity check, we should run the command again though. If nothing actually happens, then it means all went well. We should have gotten Nginx installed and started the first time around.

Conclusion

Now, we can run this:

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cloud_user@worker]$ knife node show web-node1 -a run_list

And we’ll see that our node is using a role, instead of a recipe directly. Since this is exactly how we wanted things to be running, we’re done. Congratulations!