Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
If Sublime Text isn't the right GUI editor for you, some other free alternatives to consider
would be
gedit
for Linux,
TextMate 2
for Mac OS X, and
Notepad++
for Windows.
NOTE
Although there are currently no integrated development environments (IDEs) for Chef,
Ruby IDEs work well with Chef—
RubyMine
,
IntelliJ IDEA
,
Eclipse
to name a few. A
Ruby IDE will include a programmer's text editor as well.
Also, JetBrains supports Chef in its RubyMine and IntelliJ IDEs.
Chef Development Tools
The Chef Development Kit includes all the basic tools you need to get started writing Chef
code. In the following sections we'll cover how to install the Chef Development Kit on
Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Follow the applicable section that matches the operating
system on your computer.
All Chef development tools are written in Ruby, a popular scripting language. The use of a
scripting language eliminates the need to write and maintain native code individually for
Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Instead, a single set of Ruby scripts implements the Chef
development tools on these three supported platforms. For the scripts to function, you must
install a native Ruby scripting engine to run the Chef development tools.
The Chef Development Kit installer for each platform comes bundled with the correct native
Ruby scripting engine. The Chef development tools and the Ruby scripting engine are in-
stalled outside any commonly used system locations. This ensures that the Ruby bundled
with Chef will not interfere with another copy of Ruby used elsewhere on your system.
As of this writing, the Chef Development Kit is relatively new and supports only recent ver-
sions of Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. If you happen to be using an operating system ver-
sion that isn't currently supported by the Chef Development Kit, you'll find additional in-
structions showing you how to manually install the extra development tools you'll need after
installing Chef Client.
