Getting Started With ChefDK

May 22, 2019

I am getting back into Chef, and the landscape seems to have changed quite a bit in the last 10 years. I am going to documenting the journey in a series of bite sized articles.

We will focus on the how, and not so much on the why. If you are still in discovery mode trying to find the right solution for your needs, then I suggest you keep looking as Chef might not be what you need.

The official docs are here. Adjust the values accordingly (we are using sw_vers to tease out your Mac OSX version).

CHEF_VERSION=4.0.60 && \
  CHEF_SUBV=1 && \
  MACOSX_VERSION=$(sw_vers | grep ProductVersion | egrep -o '\d+\.\d+') && \
  curl -o /tmp/chefdk.dmg \
    https://packages.chef.io/files/stable/chefdk/${CHEF_VERSION}/mac_os_x/${MACOSX_VERSION}/chefdk-${CHEF_VERSION}-${CHEF_SUBV}.dmg && \
  open /tmp/chefdk.dmg

The latest version is 4.0.60, please check ChefDK Releases to get the appropriate version

That should download the SDK for your Mac (not running OS X then check out the docs). and popup the installer.

If you click on the .pkg that will open up the installer. Follow the instructions.

The installed things into /opt/chefdk. Let’s make the chefdk tools available from anywhere on your machine by adding it to your path.

vi ~/.bash_profile

And in there add a line that looks like the following

...
PATH="/opt/chefdk/bin:$PATH"
...
export PATH

If everything worked as expected then open up a new terminal, and check the version of your installed chef

chef -v

The output should look similiar to

Chef Development Kit Version: 3.10.1
chef-client version: 14.12.9
delivery version: master (9d07501a3b347cc687c902319d23dc32dd5fa621)
berks version: 7.0.8
kitchen version: 1.24.0
inspec version: 3.9.3

If you want to see all the tools available, then run

ls -1a /opt/chefdk/bin/

And the output should be similar to

.
..
.gitkeep
berks
chef
chef-apply
chef-client
chef-resource-inspector
chef-run
chef-shell
chef-solo
chef-vault
cookstyle
dco
delivery
foodcritic
inspec
kitchen
knife
ohai
print_execution_environment
push-apply
pushy-client
pushy-service-manager