Overview

Getting started with Chef can be difficult. Hatch aims to get you up and running quickly, either locally using virtual machines or remotely with EC2 instances.

There also exists the chicken-or-the-egg problem of deploying a live Chef server without a pre-existing Chef server to manage it. If you're uncomfortable (or prohibited from) using the Opscode Platform, Hatch can make it trivial to bootstrap a live, self-managed Chef server using Chef Solo remotely.

How It Works

Hatch contains a Knife plugin and Vagrant provisioner that are capable of bootstrapping a live Chef server. The server is automatically pre-seeded with all the cookbooks and roles from your Chef repository and provisioned to your liking with Chef Solo. After the initial Chef Solo run, management is handed off to the Chef server running on the host. For remote (EC2) hosts, Hatch copies your Chef repository over the wire and bootstraps the Chef server using Chef Solo.

A local Knife configuration file (chef-hatch-repo/.chef/knife.rb by default) is generated along with an admin Chef client (hatch by default), allowing instant control over the hatched Chef server from the command line.

Hatch uses the chef-server and chef-client cookbooks from the official Opscode cookbooks repository.

Requirements

• Virtualbox (>= 4.1.0)
• Vagrant (>= 1.0.0) optionally installed by .rvmrc
• Chef (>= 0.10.8) optionally installed by .rvmrc
• Knife-EC2 (>= 0.5.10) optionally installed by .rvmrc
• Librarian (>= 0.0.14) optionally installed by .rvmrc

Suggested

• RVM (project .rvmrc included)

Getting Started

The Hatch repository has been forked from the official Opscode chef-repo repository. That means it's a convenient starting point for your own Chef repository. To begin, clone the Hatch repository:

Stewart:Code xdissent$ git clone https://github.com/xdissent/chef-hatch-repo.git
Cloning into chef-hatch-repo...
remote: Counting objects: 570, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (294/294), done.
remote: Total 570 (delta 208), reused 518 (delta 187)
Receiving objects: 100% (570/570), 156.65 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (208/208), done.
Stewart:Code xdissent$ cd chef-hatch-repo/

Cookbooks are managed by Librarian and must be installed before use:

Stewart:chef-hatch-repo(master) xdissent$ librarian-chef install

To update the cookbooks to the latest available versions, run librarian-chef update. See the Librarian documentation for more info.

Then hatch a Chef server in a virtual machine:

Stewart:chef-hatch-repo(master) xdissent$ vagrant up chef
[chef] Provisioning enabled with HatchProvisioner...
[chef] Importing base box 'lucid64-chef-0.10.2'...
[chef] Matching MAC address for NAT networking...
[chef] Running any VM customizations...
[chef] Clearing any previously set forwarded ports...
[chef] Forwarding ports...
[chef] -- ssh: 22 => 2222 (adapter 1)
[chef] Creating shared folders metadata...
[chef] Preparing host only network...
[chef] Booting VM...
[chef] Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes.
[chef] VM booted and ready for use!
[chef] Enabling host only network...
[chef] Setting host name...
[chef] Mounting shared folders...
[chef] -- v-csc-0: /tmp/vagrant-chef/cookbooks-0
[chef] -- v-root: /vagrant
[chef] -- v-csr-0: /tmp/vagrant-chef/roles-0
[chef] Running provisioner: HatchProvisioner...
[chef] Generating chef JSON and uploading...
[chef] Running chef-solo...
[chef] [Sat, 04 Jun 2011 13:37:35 -0700] INFO: *** Chef 0.10.2 ***
: stdout
[chef] [Sat, 04 Jun 2011 13:37:36 -0700] DEBUG: Building node object for chef.local
: stdout
[chef] [Sat, 04 Jun 2011 13:37:36 -0700] DEBUG: Extracting run list from JSON attributes provided on command line
…
[chef] [Sat, 04 Jun 2011 13:49:43 -0700] INFO: Running report handlers
: stdout
[chef] [Sat, 04 Jun 2011 13:49:43 -0700] INFO: Report handlers complete
: stdout
[chef] [Sat, 04 Jun 2011 13:49:43 -0700] DEBUG: Exiting
: stdout
[chef] : stdout
[chef] Creating chef user hatch
[chef] Grabbing client key
[chef] Grabbing validation key

The Chef server can be managed using the knife command:

Stewart:chef-hatch-repo(master) xdissent$ knife status
5 minutes ago, chef.local, chef.local, 10.0.2.15, ubuntu 10.04.
Stewart:chef-hatch-repo(master) xdissent$ knife cookbook list
apache2           0.99.3
apt               1.1.1
bluepill          0.2.0
build-essential   1.0.0
chef-client       0.99.5
chef-server       0.99.11
couchdb           0.14.1
daemontools       0.9.0
erlang            0.8.2
gecode            0.99.0
java              1.1.0
openssl           0.1.0
runit             0.14.2
ucspi-tcp         1.0.0
xml               0.1.0
zlib              0.1.0

By default, the Chef WebUI is enabled and running at http://<chef-server-url>:4040 (http://192.168.10.10:4040 by default for virtual machines).

A demo virtual machine is defined in Hatch's Vagrantfile to demonstrate how to launch a node to be managed by the hatched Chef server:

Stewart:chef-hatch-repo(master) xdissent$ vagrant up demo
[demo] Fixed port collision 'ssh'. Now on port 2200.
[demo] Provisioning enabled with chef_server...
[demo] Importing base box 'lucid64-chef-0.10.2'...
[demo] Matching MAC address for NAT networking...
[demo] Running any VM customizations...
[demo] Clearing any previously set forwarded ports...
[demo] Forwarding ports...
[demo] -- ssh: 22 => 2200 (adapter 1)
[demo] Creating shared folders metadata...
[demo] Preparing host only network...
[demo] Booting VM...
[demo] Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes.
[demo] VM booted and ready for use!
[demo] Enabling host only network...
[demo] Setting host name...
[demo] Mounting shared folders...
[demo] -- v-root: /vagrant
[demo] Running provisioner: Vagrant::Provisioners::ChefServer...
[demo] Creating folder to hold client key...
[demo] Uploading chef client validation key...
[demo] Generating chef JSON and uploading...
[demo] Running chef-client...
…
[demo] [Sat, 04 Jun 2011 14:34:26 -0700] INFO: Chef Run complete in 29.351055 seconds
: stdout
[demo] [Sat, 04 Jun 2011 14:34:26 -0700] INFO: Running report handlers
: stdout
[demo] [Sat, 04 Jun 2011 14:34:26 -0700] INFO: Report handlers complete
: stdout
[demo] : stdout
Stewart:chef-hatch-repo(master) xdissent$ knife status
7 minutes ago, chef.local, chef.local, 10.0.2.15, ubuntu 10.04.
2 minutes ago, demo.local, demo.local, 10.0.2.15, ubuntu 10.04.

Working With EC2

The Hatch Knife plugin launches and provisions a live chef server as an EC2 instance. It takes the same options as the knife-ec2 plugin's knife ec2 server create:

Stewart:chef-hatch-repo(master) xdissent$ knife hatch -f m1.small -I ami-e4d42d8d -G chef,ssh,default -Z us-east-1c -N chef.xdissent.com -S xdissent -x ubuntu -i ~/.ssh/aws-xdissent.pem -A <aws-key-id> -K <aws-secret> --region us-east-1
WARNING: No knife configuration file found
Instance ID: i-d5d35ebb
Flavor: m1.small
Image: ami-e4d42d8d
Availability Zone: us-east-1c
Security Groups: chef, ssh, default
SSH Key: xdissent

Waiting for server...........................
Public DNS Name: ec2-50-19-143-129.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Public IP Address: 50.19.143.129
Private DNS Name: ip-10-91-27-138.ec2.internal
Private IP Address: 10.91.27.138

Waiting for sshd..done
Creating temporary directory
Creating solo config
Copying files to temporary directory
Creating chef-hatch tarball
…
Copying chef-hatch tarball to host
Warning: Permanently added '50.19.143.129' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
chef-hatch.tgz                                                                                                                                                                                          100%   71KB  70.6KB/s   00:00    
Bootstrapping Chef on ec2-50-19-143-129.compute-1.amazonaws.com
0% [Working]3-129.compute-1.amazonaws.com 
Get:1 http://security.ubuntu.com lucid-security Release.gpg [198B]
Ign http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security/main Translation-en_US   
Ign http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security/universe Translation-en_US
96% [Connecting to us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com (10.252.111.96)]           
Get:2 http://security.ubuntu.com lucid-security Release [44.7kB]    
0% [Connecting to us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com (10.252.111.96)] [2 Release 
…
ec2-50-19-143-129.compute-1.amazonaws.com [Sun, 05 Jun 2011 03:06:47 +0000] INFO: Chef Run complete in 440.602521 seconds
ec2-50-19-143-129.compute-1.amazonaws.com [Sun, 05 Jun 2011 03:06:47 +0000] INFO: Running report handlers
ec2-50-19-143-129.compute-1.amazonaws.com [Sun, 05 Jun 2011 03:06:47 +0000] INFO: Report handlers complete
Creating admin user
Copying keys
Downloading keys
validation.pem                                                                                                                                                                                          100% 1675     1.6KB/s   00:00    
hatch.pem                                                                                                                                                                                               100% 1679     1.6KB/s   00:00    
Creating knife.rb
Uploading all cookbooks
Uploading all roles
Finishing hatching and restarting chef-client
Removing temporary directory

Instance ID: i-d5d35ebb
Flavor: m1.small
Image: ami-e4d42d8d
Availability Zone: us-east-1c
Security Groups: default, ssh, chef
Public DNS Name: ec2-50-19-143-129.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Public IP Address: 50.19.143.129
Private DNS Name: ip-10-91-27-138.ec2.internal
SSH Key: xdissent
Private IP Address: 10.91.27.138
Root Device Type: instance-store
Environment: _default
Run List: role[chef_server]
Stewart:chef-hatch-repo(master) xdissent$ knife status
2 minutes ago, chef.xdissent.com, ec2-50-19-143-129.compute-1.amazonaws.com, 50.19.143.129, ubuntu 10.04.

Like the knife ec2 server create command, knife hatch may be configured using a knife.rb file, but this file will be overwritten each time you hatch a chef server! This will change in the future.