Learning Chef

Chapter 2. Configure Your Chef Development Environment

In this chapter, we’ll walk you through the process of installing and configuring all the tools necessary to write Chef automation code. The setup covered is all you need for the hands-on exercises in this book. Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows are all first-class, supported development environments by Chef Software. We’ll cover all these environments in this book, noting the platform-specific differences as necessary.

We Give You Options in This Book

There will be a little bit of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” aspect to this book, this chapter in particular. Chef supports a variety of environments: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Also, in order 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 recommended development platform for getting started with Chef. However, if the Chef Development Kit is not an option for you, we offer instructions ...