Add Nodes for the Chef Server to Manage

The chef-client agent runs Chef recipes on physical or virtual computers, called nodes, that are associated with the server. You can connect on-premises computers or instances to the Chef server to manage, provided the nodes are running supported operating systems. Registering nodes with the Chef server installs the chef-client agent software on those nodes.

The minimum supported version of chef-client on nodes associated with an AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate server is 12.16.42. We recommend running chef-client 14.10.9.

This walkthrough demonstrates how to run a knife command that adds, or bootstraps, an EC2 instance so that the Chef server can manage it. For more information about how to bootstrap nodes automatically by using a script to perform unattended association of nodes with the Chef server, see Adding Nodes Automatically in AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate.

(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

More Info

Visit the Learn Chef tutorial site to learn more about using AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate servers and Chef Automate premium features.