Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
WE GIVE YOU OPTIONS IN THIS TOPIC
There will be a little bit of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” aspect to this topic, this chapter in
particular. Chef supports a variety of environments: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Also, in or-
der to make Chef more accessible to new Chef developers, Chef Software now recommends the
use of the Chef Development Kit. Unfortunately, as of this writing, the Chef Development Kit is
not available on all the platforms supported by Chef.
You will find that you have to make two important choices as you start your adventures with
Chef:
1. Choose a development platform: Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows.
2. Choose a Chef tool to install: Chef Development Kit or Chef Client.
The development platform is up to you. Chef supports development on Linux, Mac OS X, and
Windows equally well.
We recommend that beginners use the Chef Development Kit, if you can, as that is now the re-
commended development platform for getting started with Chef. However, if the Chef Develop-
ment Kit is not an option for you, we offer instructions on how to do Chef development simulat-
ing the Chef Development Kit with existing tools. We take care not to leave you out in the cold if
you can't use the Chef Development Kit right now.
Once you have made a commitment to Chef in your production environment, you have also made
a committment to learning Ruby. Many experienced Chef users prefer to manage their own Ruby
development environment manually using Ruby virtual managers such as
rvm
,
rbenv
, or
chruby
,
as any Ruby developer would. However, many beginners find this too daunting at first, so cover-
ing Ruby development environments in more detail is beyond the scope of this topic. Since this
topic is aimed primarily at Chef beginners, we cover the installation options that provide prepack-
aged Ruby environments: the Chef Development Kit and Chef Client.
The section for each platform covers the choices you must make and the installation steps you
must perform in more detail. Be prepared to skip around a bit in this chapter.
Install a Programmer's Text Editor
To write Chef code, you must use an editor designed to save files in raw text format. Do not
use Microsoft Word, or a similar editor that saves text in a different file format, as Chef will
have difficulty reading your files. Make sure that you have either a command line text editor
or GUI text editor handy.
