Installing Chef and Berkshelf

This is part of my quest to sort out my website. Installing Chef and Berkshelf.

In order to avoid “server rot” – which appears to be a term I just coined – I’m going to avoid (as much as possible) manually building my web server. This means that I should use something such as chef or puppet to manage it instead.

I’m going to use chef, entirely because that’s what we use at Electric Imp, meaning that if I have any questions, I can ask our devops team.

To install chef, you could simply:

# DON'T DO THIS!
sudo gem install chef

To manage chef’s “cookbooks”, I’m going to install berkshelf:

# DON'T DO THIS!
sudo gem install berkshelf

But sudo gem install is not very source-control-friendly. Instead, use bundler, which we should install like this:

# DO DO THIS
sudo gem install bundler

Then, create a Gemfile containing the following:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'chef'
gem 'berkshelf'

And then run the following command:

sudo bundle install

Note that this installs the gems system-wide. If you want to manage different versions, then you should look at rvm.