More elegant way to remotely run chef-client

chef

This is the way recommended in the Chef Fast Start tutorial:

knife ssh name:mynode -a ipaddress  -x ubuntu -i mycredentials.pem "sudo chef-client"

This is really clumsy. Is there really not a better way, or is the idea that in a real production environment, you'll have nodes auto-updating anyway?

Best Answer

That'd pretty much how you get things started to begin with, but it only needs to be done once. The initial run of chef-client typically enables and starts the chef-client daemon as an init.d service.

If you really wanted to do it more elegantly, you could ditch knife-ssh and run ssh directly:

ssh ubuntu@ipadddress -i mycredentials.pem sudo chef-client

that will probably be faster, as knife-ssh does a search against the Chef server to fetch nodes matching the search term (in this case name:dynode), which you don't strictly need to do if you already know the IP address.

Related Solutions

Linux – Which way is the most ‘elegant’ way of installing packages with Chef

I typically don't support too many distros in my own recipes, but when reading other recipes (such as from Opscode) I generally appreciate approaches similar to your second, above, the main difference is that I would tend to explicitly invoke the resource directly, rather than compile an array.

case node[:platform]
when "centos","redhat","fedora"
  package 'net-snmp'
else
  package 'snmpd'
end

However, there are a number of pros and cons for each case, depending on what exactly you're trying to express.

Chef clients behind firewall

The chef-server never connects to the nodes. The chef-client running on the nodes always connect to the chef-server, and always via HTTP/S, because the chef-server has a REST API.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Which way is the most ‘elegant’ way of installing packages with Chef

Chef clients behind firewall

Related Topic