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provisioning-chefclient

Chef Client Provisioner

Provisioner name: chef_client

The chef client provisioner allows you to provision the guest using Chef, specifically by connecting to an existing Chef Server and registering the Vagrant machine as a node within your infrastructure.

If you're just learning Chef for the first time, you probably want to start with the Chef Solo provisioner.

Warning: If you're not familiar with Chef and Vagrant already, I recommend starting with the shell provisioner.

Authenticating

The minimum required to use provision using Chef client is to provide a URL to the Chef sever as well as the path to the validation key so that the node can register with the Chef server:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef|
    chef.chef_server_url = "http://mychefserver.com:4000/"
    chef.validation_key_path = "validation.pem"
  end
end

The node will register with the Chef server specified, download the proper run list for that node, and provision.

Specifying a Run List

Normally, the Chef server is responsible for specifying the run list for the node. However, you can override what the Chef server sends down by manually specifying a run list:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provision "chef_client" do |chef|
    # Add a recipe
    chef.add_recipe "apache"

    # Or maybe a role
    chef.add_role "web"
  end
end

Remember, this will override the run list specified on the Chef server itself.

Environments

You can specify the environment for the node to come up in using the environment configuration option:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provision "chef_client" do |chef|
    # ...

    chef.environment = "development"
  end
end

Other Configuration Options

There are a few more configuration options available. These generally don't need to be modified but are available if your Chef server requires customization of these variables:

client_key_path
node_name
validation_client_name

Cleanup

When you provision your Vagrant virtual machine with Chef server, it creates a new Chef "node" entry and Chef "client" entry on the Chef server, using the hostname of the machine. After you tear down your guest machine, you must explicitly delete these entries from the Chef server before you provision a new one with Chef server. For example, using Chef's built-in knife tool:

$ knife node delete precise64
$ knife client delete precise64

If you fail to do so, you'll get the following error when Vagrant tries to provision the machine with Chef client:

HTTP Request Returned 409 Conflict: Client already exists.

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