Installing Chef Solo on a windows Server

Question

I am new to Chef and cloud. I have to install chef on windows server 2008. I was going through the documentation here: http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installing+Chef+Client+on+Windows

But few of the steps are not clear to me.

I have a very simple setup, its Chef solo so I have just one windows server where I am trying to install it and practice writing some cookbooks.

Please help me out with this. The steps in the link above which is not clear to me is: Step Name: Copy over the validation key I do not understand which validation.pem it is talking about.

Thanks for your help in advance..

Answer 1

If you only want to use Chef Solo, then you don't need to do anything with "validation.pem", "'USERNAME'.pem", or "knife.rb".

Step 1: Install the Chef Windows MSI.

Step 2: Read the Chef Solo Documentation.

The paths on that page are specific to Unix, but you should be able to adapt them to the appropriate places for your Windows system.

Essentially to use Chef Solo, you need:

1. A solo.rb configuration file. This should point to the location of the cookbooks you're using, e.g., "C:\chef\cookbooks"

2. A JSON file that describes the node (like, create mynode.json), particularly the run list to use, e.g.:

   { "run_list": ["recipe[windows]", "recipe[mycookbook_one"]] }

Et cetera.

1. The actual cookbooks in the location specified in the solo.rb. You can download several from the Chef Community Site that already work with Windows such as "windows", "iis", "sql_server" and many more.

2. Run chef-solo specifying the config file and the JSON file. You'll probably want to do this as Administrator.

   chef-solo -c solo.rb -j mynode.json

If you get stuck, the Chef Users Mailing List is a great place to ask questions.