Chef - Troubleshooting

We need to download the correct version of ChefDK, which is 2.4.17. In a command line, run:

wget https://packages.chef.io/files/stable/chefdk/2.4.17/el/7/chefdk-2.4.17-1.el7.x86_64.rpm

Now install it:

sudo rpm -ivh chefdk-2.4.17-1.el7.x86_64.rpm

Once it's installed, we need to make sure Chef uses the correct system locations for things:

echo 'eval "$(chef shell-init bash)"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

Now check to see if it worked with which ruby, and we should see /opt/chefdk/embedded/bin/ruby get returned.

We need Docker on our workstation, so we will need to install the yum-utils, add the Docker repository, and install Docker.

sudo yum -y install yum-utils
sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo
sudo yum -y install docker-ce

Now let's set Docker to start now, and on system boot:

sudo systemctl start docker
sudo systemctl enable docker

We should also set your user to be able to use Docker without using the sudo command. Once we've done this, we have to log out and back in again:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
exit

Use SSH to get back in again, and check to make sure Docker is running:

docker ps

If we can do that without prefacing it with sudo, we're ready to continue.

When we use Kitchen, later in the lab, we need Git to be installed and set up with some basic information. These commands will make that happen:

Install it:

sudo yum -y install git

Configure some Git basics, like the username, email address, and a default text editor:

git config --global user.name "USERNAME"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git config --global core.editor vim

Note: We can use fake email information, since we don't actually use it for this lab. It just needs to be set or we will get errors later.

Docker requires a gem for this all to work. Install it with this:

gem install kitchen-docker

To perform the tasks properly you should change SELinux so that it is permissive:

sudo setenforce permissive

We should also /etc/selinux/config and change things to permissive there too:

sudo vim /etc/selinux/config

Change the SELINUX line from SELINUX=enforcing to SELINUX=permissive

la_troubleshooting is the current broken cookbook that we need to fix.

la_bad is an exact copy of la_troubleshooting, in case we need to start over or refer back to it.

la_good a working "fixed" copy that we can refer to if we're really stuck.

Let's get in and start looking around for problems and symptoms. Run cd la_troubleshooting to get into the directory, then run kitchen converge to watch what happens.

It fails. If we scroll back up a bit into the logs, we can see a SyntaxError, and the problem appears to be in recipes/default.rb.

Destroy the kitchen (with kitchen destroy) and let's go have a look at our recipe:

vim recipes/default.rb

The error was about the elinks package, but in this file, that section looks fine. The problem is earlier. there's a missing quote in the line: service 'httpd do line. Fix that (adding a single quote after 'httpd), save the file, and try another kitchen converge.

It fails again, doesn't it? Now what's our error saying? Up in the resource declaration, we can see something's wrong with that section of the cookbook. Again, edit the file:

vim recipes/default.rb

If we look in that section, something should stand out. We've declared a path of /varwww/html/index.html, but there's no such place. We're missing a forward slash between var and www. Let's add that in, save the file, and try a kitchen converge again.

It worked!

Everything looks good, but is it really? It looks like this cookbook is supposed to set up a web server with some content in the index.html page. Does it? Log into the kitchen, and check the file itself, both by just reading it and in a (text-based) web browser:

kitchen login
cat /var/www/html/index.html
elinks http://localhost

If we see SUCCESS, we've succeeded.

Get out of the kitchen and destroy it:

exit
kitchen destroy