CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2015/ch1a 2 WA

Background

Knife is the command line tool for managing Chef nodes. If you are unfamiliar with Chef and how it works, check out the comparison between Chef and Puppet here: [1] or take a look at the official Chef website here: [2]. There, a deeper understanding of Chef can be attained. Simply, Chef allows the distribution of server environments between many different servers (called nodes). Any changes to the primary chef server (called the chef repo are distributed throughout all the other nodes, while different nodes can have other recipes and send them back to the chef repo. Knife, then, handles the communication between nodes and the chef repo. For example, let's say that there is an object on the chef repo that a node desires. Knife provides the tools to download that object to the node. Knife also allows setting up a node, installing necessary packages, management of users, and much more.

Examples

Using Knife is fairly straightforward, with usage following this syntax:

knife [verb] [object]