Welcome to Chef!

Chef is a systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure. With Chef, you can:

• Manage your servers by writing code, not by running commands. (via Cookbooks)
• Integrate tightly with your applications, databases, LDAP directories, and more. (via Libraries)
• Easily configure applications that require knowledge about your entire infrastructure ("What systems are running my application?" "What is the current master database server?")

Learn about Chef

You want to learn more about Chef? We want to teach you about Chef! How convenient!

Lets start at the top, shall we?

Getting Started

Head over to the Getting Started guide, which will walk you through Installation, creating a Chef Repository, and getting a Cookbook Quick Start at building Cookbooks.

Cooking with Chef

Once you've gotten yourself situated, it's time to go to Cooking School. In this section, we talk about Nodes, Cookbooks (and their components: Recipes, Definitions, Attributes, Libraries, Files and Templates), Resources, Providers and Search Indexes. It's where you'll learn what each piece of Chef is, and how they all fit together.

Chef Architecture

With all that under your belt, it's time to tackle the dirty secrets of what's happening behind the scenes with Chef Architecture. We'll give you the scoop on the four executable parts of Chef - Chef Server, Chef Indexer, Chef Client and Chef Solo. We close with Anatomy of a Chef Run, where we go in-depth with the process by which your systems get configured.

Using Chef?

Are you using Chef, either personally or in your organization? If so, please add an entry to the Chef Users List.

Recently Updated

by Thom May (5 hours ago) Resources (Chef)

by Adam Jacob (12 hours ago) Lightweight Resources and Providers (Chef)

by Adam Jacob (13 hours ago) Feature Proposals (Chef)

by Cary Penniman (15 hours ago) Resources (Chef)

by Joshua Timberman (15 hours ago) Installation on Ubuntu 9.10 with debs (Chef)

by Joshua Timberman (16 hours ago) Installation (Chef)

by Joshua Timberman (22 hours ago) Resources (Chef)

by Joshua Timberman (24 Aug) Installation on CentOS 4 with RubyGems (Chef)

by Joshua Timberman (24 Aug) RubyGems Instructions Excerpt (Chef)

by Joe Williams (21 Aug) Feature Proposals (Chef)

by Joe Williams (21 Aug) Re: Chef Groups (Chef)

by Joe Williams (21 Aug) Re: Chef Groups (Chef)

by Christopher Brown (20 Aug) Re: Interface Defintions (Chef)

by Brian P O'Rourke (20 Aug) Configuring Chef Server and Clients (Chef)

by Anthony Lopez (19 Aug) Re: Installation on RHEL and CentOS 5 with RPMs (Chef)

Beginning to believe the cloud may be the way. This looks pretty interesting.