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Chef Solo Provisioner

Type: chef-solo

The Chef solo provisioner installs and configures software on machines built by Packer using chef-solo. Cookbooks can be uploaded from your local machine to the remote machine or remote paths can be used.

The provisioner will even install Chef onto your machine if it isn't already installed, using the official Chef installers provided by Opscode.

Basic Example

The example below is fully functional and expects cookbooks in the "cookbooks" directory relative to your working directory.

{
  "type": "chef-solo",
  "cookbook_paths": ["cookbooks"]
}

Configuration Reference

The reference of available configuration options is listed below. No configuration is actually required, but at least run_list is recommended.

cookbook_paths (array of strings) - This is an array of paths to "cookbooks" directories on your local filesystem. These will be uploaded to the remote machine in the directory specified by the staging_directory. By default, this is empty.
execute_command (string) - The command used to execute Chef. This has various configuration template variables available. See below for more information.
install_command (string) - The command used to install Chef. This has various configuration template variables available. See below for more information.
remote_cookbook_paths (array of string) - A list of paths on the remote machine where cookbooks will already exist. These may exist from a previous provisioner or step. If specified, Chef will be configured to look for cookbooks here. By default, this is empty.
json (object) - An arbitrary mapping of JSON that will be available as node attributes while running Chef.
prevent_sudo (boolean) - By default, the configured commands that are executed to install and run Chef are executed with sudo. If this is true, then the sudo will be omitted.
run_list (array of strings) - The run list for Chef. By default this is empty.
skip_install (boolean) - If true, Chef will not automatically be installed on the machine using the Opscode omnibus installers.
staging_directory (string) - This is the directory where all the configuration of Chef by Packer will be placed. By default this is "/tmp/packer-chef-solo". This directory doesn't need to exist but must have proper permissions so that the SSH user that Packer uses is able to create directories and write into this folder. If the permissions are not correct, use a shell provisioner prior to this to configure it properly.

Execute Command

By default, Packer uses the following command (broken across multiple lines for readability) to execute Chef:

{{if .Sudo}sudo {{end}}chef-solo \
  --no-color \
  -c {{.ConfigPath}} \
  -j {{.JsonPath}}

This command can be customized using the execute_command configuration. As you can see from the default value above, the value of this configuration can contain various template variables, defined below:

ConfigPath - The path to the Chef configuration file.
JsonPath - The path to the JSON attributes file for the node.
Sudo - A boolean of whether to sudo the command or not, depending on the value of the prevent_sudo configuration.

Install Command

By default, Packer uses the following command (broken across multiple lines for readability) to install Chef. This command can be customized if you want to install Chef in another way.

curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | \
  {{if .Sudo}}sudo{{end}} bash

This command can be customized using the install_command configuration.

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