Dear Loyal Readers,
If you ever wish you could bootstrap a machine with chef-zero, but remotely, then knife-zero plugin is for you (aka: “do you ever wish Chef were more like Ansible?”).
Last week, I was trying to combine multiple knife commands: “-z” for using chef zero, and “bootstrap” for making a remote computer install chef-client first. But, I kept getting the following error:
“No socketless chef-zero server on given port 8889”
It took me a while to realize that knife/chef-zero simply doesn’t work in this configuration [yet]. Thankfully, someone in the chef community has already made a plugin that adds this feature. In this configuration, you can host your entire chef repository complete with cookbooks/roles/nodes/clients locally and still run chef-client on a remote node. This plugin creates an ssh tunnel so that when chef-zero listens on the master node, and the remote node tries to http connect to itself, it actually tunnels back to the listening master node.
I installed it like this:
git clone https://github.com/higanworks/knife-zero /opt/chef/embedded/bin/gem build knife-zero.gemspec /opt/chef/embedded/bin/gem install -l knife-zero-1.9.1.gem
And now it runs beautifully like this:
knife zero bootstrap -z remotehost -N remotehost -r 'role[Myrole]'
Until the Robots take the blue pill,
Jonathan Malachowski
