knife - Chef Server REST API utility
knife sub-command (options)
This manual page documents knife, a command-line utility used to interact with a Chef server directly through the RESTful API. Knife uses sub-commands to take various actions on different types of Chef objects. Some sub-commands take additional options. General options follow sub-commands and their options. A configuration file can be created for common defaults.
Unless otherwise specified, output is in JSON format, and input files are also JSON format.
The Chef class Chef::Config that configures the behavior of how knife
runs has options that correspond to command-line options. These are
noted as Chef::Config values.
-s, --server-url URLChef::Config chef_server_url.-k, --key KEYChef::Config client_key.-c, --config CONFIG-e, --editor EDITOR-F, --format FORMAT-l, --log_level LEVELChef::Config log_level.-L, --logfile LOGLOCATIONChef::Config log_location.-n, --no-editor-u, --user USERChef::Config node_name.-p, --print-after-v, --version-y, --yes-h, --helpUsage information for sub-commands can be displayed with knife SUB-COMMAND --help.
Knife sub-commands are structured as NOUN verb NOUN (options). The sub-commands are meant to be intuitively named. Because the Chef Server API is RESTful, sub-commands generally utilize CRUD operations.
Objects stored on the server support these, as described below.
recipe list [PATTERN]
List available recipes from the server. Specify PATTERN as a regular expression to limit the results.
The knife configuration file is a Ruby DSL to set configuration
parameters for Knife's GENERAL OPTIONS. The default location for the
config file is ~/.chef/knife.rb. If managing multiple Chef
repositories, per-repository config files can be created. The file must
be .chef/knife.rb in the current directory of the repository.
If the config file exists, knife uses these settings for GENERAL OPTIONS defaults.
log_level
A Ruby symbol specifying the log level. Corresponds to -l or --log_level option. Default is :info. Valid values are:
log_location
Corresponds to the -L or --log-file option. Defaults is STDOUT.
Valid values are STDOUT or a filename.
node_name
User to authenticate to the Chef server. Corresponds to the -u or
--user option. This is requested from the user when running this
sub-command.
client_key
Private key file to authenticate to the Chef server. Corresponds to the
-k or --key option. This is requested from the user when running
this sub-command.
chef_server_url
URL of the Chef server. Corresponds to the -s or --server-url
option. This is requested from the user when running this sub-command.
cache_type
The type of cache to use. Default is BasicFile. This can be any type of Cache that moneta supports: BasicFile, Berkeley, Couch, DataMapper, File, LMC, Memcache, Memory, MongoDB, Redis, Rufus, S3, SDBM, Tyrant, Xattr, YAML.
cache_options
Specifies various options to use for caching. Default reads the Chef client configuration (/etc/chef/checksums).
validation_client_name
Specifies the name of the client used to validate new clients. This is requested from the user when running the configuration sub-command.
validation_key
Specifies the private key file to use for generating ec2 instance data
for validating new clients. This is implied from the
validation_client_name.
cookbook_copyright
cookbook_email
cookbook_license
Used by knife cookbook create sub-command to specify the copyright
holder, maintainer email and license (respectively) for new cookbooks.
The copyright holder is listed as the maintainer in the cookbook's
metadata and as the Copyright in the comments of the default recipe. The
maintainer email is used in the cookbook metadata. The license
determines what preamble to put in the comment of the default recipe,
and is listed as the license in the cookbook metadata. Currently
supported licenses are "apachev2" and "none". Any other values will
result in an empty license in the metadata (needs to be filled in by the
author), and no comment preamble in the default recipe.
knife[:aws_access_key_id]
knife[:aws_secret_access_key]
Specifies the Amazon AWS EC2 credentials to use when running the ec2 sub-commands.
knife[:rackspace_api_username]
knife[:rackspace_api_key]
Specifies the Rackspace Cloud credentials to use when running the rackspace sub-commands.
knife[:terremark_username]
knife[:terremark_password]
knife[:terremark_service]
Specifies the Terremark vCloud credentials to use when running the terremark sub-commands.
knife[:slicehost_password]
Specifies the Slicehost password to use when running the slicdehost sub-commands.
~/.chef/knife.rb
Ruby DSL configuration file for knife. See CONFIGURATION.
When working with Chef and Knife in the local repository, the recommended workflow outline looks like:
cookbook create sub-command.A note about git: Opscode and many folks in the Chef community use git,
but it is not required, except in the case of the cookbook site vendor
sub-command, as it uses git directly. Version control is strongly
recommended though, and git fits with a lot of the workflow paradigms.
Example client config (/etc/chef/client.rb) from knife configure
client. The same configuration is used when using the knife bootstrap
command with the default gem templates that come with Chef.
log_level :info
log_location STDOUT
chef_server_url 'https://api.opscode.com/organizations/ORGNAME'
validation_client_name 'ORGNAME-validator'
Setting up a custom bootstrap is fairly straightforward. Create
.chef/bootstrap in your Chef Repository directory or in
$HOME/.chef/bootstrap. Then create the ERB template file.
mkdir ~/.chef/bootstrap
vi ~/.chef/bootstrap/debian5.0-apt.erb
For example, to create a new bootstrap template that should be used when setting up a new Debian node. Edit the template to run the commands, set up the validation certificate and the client configuration file, and finally to run chef-client on completion. The bootstrap template can be called with:
knife bootstrap mynode.example.com --template-file ~/.chef/bootstrap/debian5.0-apt.erb
Or,
knife bootstrap mynode.example.com --distro debian5.0-apt
The --distro parameter will automatically look in the
~/.chef/bootstrap directory for a file named debian5.0-apt.erb.
Templates provided by the Chef installation are located in
BASEDIR/lib/chef/knife/bootstrap/*.erb, where BASEDIR is the
location where the package or Gem installed the Chef client libraries.
Uploading cookbooks to the Opscode cookbooks site using the user/certificate specifically:
knife cookbook site share example Other -k ~/.chef/USERNAME.pem -u USERNAME
EDITORFull documentation for Chef is located on the Chef wiki, http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home/.
JSON is JavaScript Object Notation and more information can be found at http://json.org/.
SOLR is an open source search engine. The Chef Server includes a SOLR installation. More information about SOLR, including the search query syntax, can be found at http://lucene.apache.org/solr/.
Git is a version control system and documented at http://git-scm.com/.
This manual page was generated in nroff from Markdown with ronn. Ryan Tomayko wrote ronn and more information can be found at http://rtomayko.github.com/ronn/ronn.5.html.
Chef was written by Adam Jacob adam@opscode.com of Opscode (http://www.opscode.com), with contributions from the community. This manual page was written by Joshua Timberman joshua@opscode.com. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and / or modify this document under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License.
On Debian systems, the complete text of the Apache 2.0 License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0.