shef1

Interactive chef console

Usage

shef [named configuration] (options)

Overview

shef is an irb(1) (interactive ruby) session customized for Chef. shef serves two primary functions: it provides a means to interact with a Chef Server interactively using a convenient DSL; it allows you to define and run Chef recipes interactively.

Primary mode

The following commands are available in the primary session:

help: Prints a list of available commands

version: Prints the Chef version

recipe: Switches to recipe mode

attributes: Switches to attributes mode

run_chef: Initiates a chef run

reset: reinitializes shef

echo :on|:off: Turns irb´s echo function on or off. Echo is on by default.

tracing :on|:off: Turns irb´s function tracing feature on or off. Tracing is extremely verbose and expected to be of interest primarily to developers.

node: Returns the node object for the current host. See knife-node(1) for more information about nodes.

ohai: Prints the attributes of node

In addition to these commands, shef provides a DSL for accessing data on the Chef Server. When working with remote data in shef, you chain method calls in the form object type.operation, where object type is in plural form. The following object types are available:

•: nodes

•: roles

•: data_bags

•: clients

•: cookbooks

For each object type the following operations are available:

object type.all(&block): Loads all items from the server. If the optional code block is given, each item will be passed to the block and the results returned, similar to ruby´s Enumerable#map method.

object type.show(object name): Aliased as object type.load

: Loads the singular item identified by object name.

object type.search(query, &block): Aliased as object type.find

: Runs a search against the server and returns the matching items. If the optional code block is given each item will be passed to the block and the results returned.

: The query may be a Solr/Lucene format query given as a String, or a Hash of conditions. If a Hash is given, the options will be ANDed together. To join conditions with OR, use negative queries, or any advanced search syntax, you must provide give the query in String form.

object type.transform(:all|query, &block): Aliased as object type.bulk_edit

: Bulk edit objects by processing them with the (required) code block. You can edit all objects of the given type by passing the Symbol :all as the argument, or only a subset by passing a query as the argument. The query is evaluated in the same way as with search.

: The return value of the code block is used to alter the behavior of transform. If the value returned from the block is nil or false, the object will not be saved. Otherwise, the object is saved after being passed to the block. This behavior can be exploited to create a dry run to test a data transformation.

Recipe mode

Recipe mode implements Chef´s recipe DSL. Exhaustively documenting this DSL is outside the scope of this document. See the following pages in the Chef documentation for more information:

•: http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Resources

•: http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Recipes

Once you have defined resources in the recipe, you can trigger a convergence run via run_chef

Examples

•: A "Hello World" interactive recipe

: chef > recipe
chef:recipe > echo :off
chef:recipe > file "/tmp/hello_world"
chef:recipe > run_chef
[Sat, 09 Apr 2011 08:56:56 -0700] INFO: Processing file[/tmp/hello_world] action create ((irb#1) line 2)
[Sat, 09 Apr 2011 08:56:56 -0700] INFO: file[/tmp/hello_world] created file /tmp/hello_world
chef:recipe > pp ls ´/tmp´
[".",
"..",
"hello_world"]

•: Search for nodes by role, and print their IP addresses

: chef > nodes.find(:roles => ´monitoring-server´) {|n| n[:ipaddress] }
=> ["10.254.199.5"]

•: Remove the role obsolete from every node in the system

: chef > nodes.transform(:all) {|n| n.run_list.delete(´role[obsolete]´) }
=> [node[chef098b2.opschef.com], node[ree-woot], node[graphite-dev], node[fluke.localdomain], node[ghost.local], node[kallistec]]

Documentation

This manual page was written by Daniel DeLeo [email protected]. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and / or modify this document under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License.

Chef

Shef is distributed with Chef. http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home