I like chef-zero a lot. There’s so much overlap between chef’s products: chef-zero, chef-solo, chef-apply - yes, each have their own uses, but I digress. Chef-zero has been relatively pain-free for me - except when I tried to get it running - trying to figure out why it wasn’t fetching the cookbooks was so annoying! I went and RTFM couple of times, no dice. Then I decided to not skim read and read the entire thing.
chef-zero is a very lightweight Chef server that runs in-memory on the local machine. This allows the chef-client to be run against the chef-repo as if it were running against the Chef server. chef-zero was originally a standalone tool{.reference.external}; it is enabled from within the chef-client by using the –local-mode option
Local mode does not require a configuration file, instead it will look for a directory named /cookbooks and will set chef_repo_path to be just above that. (Local mode will honor the settings in a configuration file, if desired.) If the client.rb file is not found and no configuration file is specified, local mode will search for a knife.rb file.)
Sometimes skim reading and Ctrl+F doesn’t really go in your way. Especially if what you’re searching for and what’s referred to are nowhere close to each other. Back to topic again - for a new recipe I was working on, I needed to use databags. No problem. Wanted to do some ad-hoc checks and verification before going the Test Kitchen way. No problem. Wrote the code, then it dawned me. How and where the heck do I upload the databags to? After couple of unsuccessful converge runs, mainly because of 404 when databags were being fetched, I realized that databags were not being fetched. After some searching, I found that the databags need to be in the root directory of where you’re starting your chef-zero run. And in a directory called data_bags. Not databags. Sigh. Just a pro tip.
Also, bonus video: See how chef-zero came alive during a black friday line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUYjX1SNUh8
