Project: Building a Chef 12 Server on DigitalOcean

scottalanmiller

So tonight I am working on building a new Chef 12 server on Digital Ocean. I am going to be working from the DO documentation which has me using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as the base for the server. Setting this Droplet up in their NYC datacenter. I have built Chef before, but going to go for the latest this time (I've built 11 before and worked on 10 and 11), going with the open source community version and doing it by DO's directions instead of the ones from OpsCode.

My one divergence from the directions right at the beginning is to build a much smaller instance than the one that they suggest. OpsCode recommends four cores and 4GB of RAM. DigitalOcean runs their example on four cores and 8GB of RAM. I've found that these things are often overkill and am going to see what we can do with a single core and 1GB of RAM since this will be lightly used and growing it in the future is very simple to do.

Let's have some fun with DevOps!

scottalanmiller

Droplet creation is underway. Since I am going for such a small deployment, it is only $10/mo. Not bad at all.

Following good naming convention, the new server is: dny-lnx-chef

DNY: DigitalOcean New York
LNX: Linux
Chef: The application running there.

scottalanmiller

Added the new node into DNS on CloudFlare. We use key based access so it is already accessible from our main Jump Station.

scottalanmiller

Getting all system updates applied before getting down to business.

scottalanmiller

Downloading Chef 12.1.2 now.

https://web-dl.packagecloud.io/chef/stable/packages/ubuntu/trusty/chef-server-core_12.1.2-1_amd64.deb

scottalanmiller

Install command:

sudo dpkg -i chef-server-core_12.1.2-1_amd64.deb

scottalanmiller

There was a warning in the DO instructions here: This will install the base Chef 12 system onto the server. If you have selected a server with less powerful hardware than the recommended amount, this step may fail.

But even on this little single core, 1GB RAM Droplet everything appears to have gone smoothly, no errors were generated.

scottalanmiller

I always add a few extra packages of my own:

sudo apt-get install htop sysstat fail2ban

scottalanmiller

Turn on SAR data collection:

sudo vi /etc/default/sysstat

Set the value of ENABLED to true.

scottalanmiller

Because we are creating an instance that is so tiny and tight on resources, it would be smart to set up some swap space right from the beginning to make sure that we are as well situated as possible. This is a pretty standard procedure but DigitalOcean actually has a specific How To made for this specific to Ubuntu 14.04.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-on-ubuntu-14-04

sudo fallocate -l 3G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

scottalanmiller

You will want to make that swap file permanent too:

echo "/swapfile   none    swap    sw    0   0" >> /etc/fstab

scottalanmiller

Next up, reconfiguring chef:

sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure

This step takes several minutes to run, so don't be surprised.

scottalanmiller

Now it is time to create an admin user. Of course, you will need to modify this command for your own purposes.

chef-server-ctl user-create USERNAME FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME EMAIL PASSWORD

scottalanmiller

This last step will output a private key. Make sure to save this before going on to do anything else.

scottalanmiller

Now to make our first organization, we will make a test one to get started.

chef-server-ctl org-create SHORTNAME LONGNAME --association_user USERNAME -f filename

That's the format, here is a real command:

chef-server-ctl org-create test "Chef Testing NonProd" --association_user scott -f scott.pem