Add nodes individually

Important

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate reached end of life on May 5, 2024 and has been disabled for both new and existing customers. We recommend that existing customers migrate to Chef SaaS or an alternative solution. If you have questions, you can reach out to the AWS Support Team on AWS re:Post or through AWS Premium Support.

This section describes how to run a knife command that adds, or bootstraps, an EC2 instance so that the Chef server can manage it.

The minimum supported version of chef-client on nodes associated with an AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate server is 13.x. We recommend running the most current, stable chef-client version.

(Optional) Specify the URL of your Chef Automate Server Root CA

If your server is using a custom domain and certificate, you might need to edit the ROOT_CA_URL variable in the userdata script with a public URL that you can use to get the root CA PEM-formatted certificate of your server. The following AWS CLI commands upload your root CA to an Amazon S3 bucket, and generate a presigned URL that you can use for one hour.

1. Upload the root CA PEM-formatted certificate to S3.

   aws s3 cp ROOT_CA_PEM_FILE_PATH s3://bucket_name/

2. Generate a presigned URL that you can use for one hour (3600 seconds, in this example) to download the root CA.

   aws s3 presign s3://bucket_name/ROOT_CA_PEM_FILE_NAME --expires-in 3600

3. Edit the variable ROOT_CA_URL in the userdata script with the value of the pre-signed URL.

Supported Operating Systems

For the current list of supported operating systems for nodes, see the Chef website.

Add Nodes with Knife

The knife-ec2 plug-in is included with Chef Workstation. If you are more familiar with knife-ec2, you can use it instead of knife bootstrap to provision and bootstrap new EC2instances. Otherwise, launch a new EC2 instance, and then follow the steps in this section.

To add nodes to manage

1. Run the following knife bootstrap command. This command bootstraps an EC2 instance to the nodes that your Chef server will manage. Note that you are instructing the Chef server to run recipes from the nginx cookbook that you installed in Use Policyfile.rb to Get Cookbooks from a Remote Source. For more information about adding nodes by running the knife bootstrap command, see Bootstrap a Node in the Chef documentation.

   The following table shows valid user names for node operating systems in the knife command in this step. If neither root nor ec2-user works, check with your AMI provider. For more information about connecting to Linux-based instances, see Connecting to Your Linux Instance Using SSH in the AWS documentation.

   Valid values for user names in node operating systems
   Operating System	Valid User Names
   Amazon Linux	ec2-user
   Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	root or ec2-user
   Ubuntu	ubuntu
   Fedora	fedora or ec2-user
   SUSE Linux	root or ec2-user

   knife bootstrap INSTANCE_IP_ADDRESS -N INSTANCE_NAME -x USER_NAME --sudo --run-list "recipe[nginx]"

2. Verify that the new node was added by running the following commands, replacing INSTANCE_NAME with the name of the instance that you just added.

   knife client show INSTANCE_NAME
   knife node show INSTANCE_NAME