Manage Multiple Nodes at Once with Chef Server - Learning Chef - page 221

NOTE
As of this writing, there is no Windows version of Chef Server. It is available on the
Linux platform exclusively. That is why you see only Linux commands in the preceding
code block.
Summary
In this chapter, we've covered the basics of installing Chef Server. We showed you how to
install a test Chef Server setup driven by Chef recipes in both sandbox environments using
Test Kitchen, and on production servers using chef-solo .
We also introduced the concept of idempotence when we covered how to write Chef code to
install Chef Server. Chef code is idempotent when it can run multiple times on the same sys-
tem and the results will always be identical, without producing unintended side effects.
Although nearly all the default Chef resources are guaranteed to be idempotent , the execute
resource is not. We showed you how to test that Chef code is idempotent by performing a
Chef run twice in succession, such as with kitchen converge . On the second run, idempo-
tent Chef code should display no resource updates.
In the next chapter, we'll talk about the Chef Community Cookbook. We'll highlight the
chef-client cookbook, an oft-used community cookbook people find useful in bootstrap-
ping nodes in production.