CHEF-SOLO(8) Chef Manual CHEF-SOLO(8)
NAME
chef-solo - Runs chef in solo mode against a specified cookbook location.
SYNOPSIS
chef-solo (options)
-c, --config CONFIG
The configuration file to use
-d, --daemonize
Daemonize the process
-g, --group GROUP
Group to set privilege to
-i, --interval SECONDS
Run chef-client periodically, in seconds
-j, --json-attributes JSON_ATTRIBS
Load attributes from a JSON file or URL
-l, --log_level LEVEL
Set the log level (debug, info, warn, error, fatal)
-L, --logfile LOGLOCATION
Set the log file location, defaults to STDOUT - recommended for daemonizing
-N, --node-name NODE_NAME
The node name for this client
-r, --recipe-url RECIPE_URL
Pull down a remote gzipped tarball of recipes and untar it to the cookbook cache.
-s, --splay SECONDS
The splay time for running at intervals, in seconds
-u, --user USER
User to set privilege to
-v, --version
Show chef version
-h, --help
Show this message
DESCRIPTION
Chef Solo allows you to run Chef Cookbooks in the absence of a Chef Server. To do this, the complete cookbook needs to be present on disk.
By default Chef Solo will look in /etc/chef/solo.rb for its configuration. This configuration file has two required variables:
file_cache_path and cookbook_path.
For example:
file_cache_path "/var/chef-solo"
cookbook_path "/var/chef-solo/cookbooks"
For your own systems, you can change this to reflect any directory you like, but you'll need to specify absolute paths and the cook-
book_path directory should be a subdirectory of the file_cache_path.
You can also specify cookbook_path as an array, passing multiple locations to search for cookbooks.
For example:
file_cache_path "/var/chef-solo"
cookbook_path ["/var/chef-solo/cookbooks", "/var/chef-solo/site-cookbooks"]
Note that earlier entries are now overridden by later ones.
Since chef-solo doesn't have any interaction with a Chef Server, you'll need to specify node-specifc attributes in a JSON file. This can be
located on the target system itself, or it can be stored on a remote server such as S3, or a web server on your network.
Within the JSON file, you'll also specify the recipes that Chef should run in the "run_list". An example JSON file, which sets a
resolv.conf:
{
"resolver": {
"nameservers": [ "10.0.0.1" ],
"search":"int.example.com"
},
"run_list": [ "recipe[resolver]" ]
}
Then you can run chef-solo with -j to specify the JSON file. It will look for cookbooks in the cookbook_path configured in the configura-
tion file, and apply attributes and use the run_list from the JSON file specified.
You can use -c to specify the path to the configuration file (if you don't want chef-solo to use the default). You can also specify -r for
a cookbook tarball.
For example:
chef-solo -c ~/solo.rb -j ~/node.json -r http://www.example.com/chef-solo.tar.gz
In the above case, chef-solo would extract the tarball to your specified cookbook_path, use ~/solo.rb as the configuration file, and apply
attributes and use the run_list from ~/node.json.
SEE ALSO
Full documentation for Chef and chef-solo is located on the Chef wiki, http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home.
AUTHOR
Chef was written by Adam Jacob adam@ospcode.com of Opscode (http://www.opscode.com), with contributions from the community. This manual
page was written by Joshua Timberman joshua@opscode.com with help2man. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and / or modify this docu-
ment under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License.
On Debian systems, the complete text of the Apache 2.0 License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0.
Chef 10.12.0 June 2012 CHEF-SOLO(8)