Setting up Knife

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The knife command line tool must be configured to communicate with the Chef Server as well as any other infrastructure within your organization. This is done initially during the workstation setup, but subsequent modifications can be made using the config.rb configuration file.

config.rb Configuration File

Knife is configured using a config.rb configuration, which contains configuration for both the knife command line tool as well as any installed knife plugins. See config.rb for a complete list of configuration options in the config.rb file.

Load Path Priority

The config.rb file is loaded every time the knife command is invoked using the following load order:

  • From a specified location given the --config flag
  • From a config.rb file within a .chef directory in the current working directory ex: ./.chef/config.rb
  • From a config.rb file within a .chef directory located one directory above the current working directory: ex: ../.chef/config.rb
  • From ~/.chef/config.rb (macOS and Linux platforms) or c:\Users\<username>\.chef (Microsoft Windows platform)

Note

When running Microsoft Windows, the config.rb file is located at %HOMEDRIVE%:%HOMEPATH%\.chef (e.g. c:\Users\<username>\.chef). If this path needs to be scripted, use %USERPROFILE%\chef-repo\.chef.

config.rb Configuration Within a Chef Repository

The config.rb configuration can include arbitrary Ruby code to extend configuration beyond static values. This can be used to load environmental variables from the workstation. This makes it possible to write a single config.rb file that can be used by all users within your organization. This single file can also be checked into your chef-repo, allowing users to load different config.rb files based on which chef-repo they execute the commands from. This can be especially useful when each chef-repo points to a different chef server or organization.

Example config.rb:

current_dir = File.dirname(__FILE__)
  user = ENV['OPSCODE_USER'] || ENV['USER']
  node_name                user
  client_key               "#{ENV['HOME']}/chef-repo/.chef/#{user}.pem"
  validation_client_name   "#{ENV['ORGNAME']}-validator"
  validation_key           "#{ENV['HOME']}/chef-repo/.chef/#{ENV['ORGNAME']}-validator.pem"
  chef_server_url          "https://api.opscode.com/organizations/#{ENV['ORGNAME']}"
  syntax_check_cache_path  "#{ENV['HOME']}/chef-repo/.chef/syntax_check_cache"
  cookbook_path            ["#{current_dir}/../cookbooks"]
  cookbook_copyright       "Your Company, Inc."
  cookbook_license         "apachev2"
  cookbook_email           "cookbooks@yourcompany.com"

  # Amazon AWS
  knife[:aws_access_key_id] = ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID']
  knife[:aws_secret_access_key] = ENV['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY']

Generating a config.rb File

The knife command knife configure can be used to generate your initial config.rb configuration file in your home directory. See knife configure for details

Setting Your Text Editor

Some knife commands, such as knife data bag edit, require that information be edited as JSON data using a text editor. For example, the following command:

$ knife data bag edit admins admin_name

will open up the text editor with data similar to:

{
  "id": "admin_name"
}

Changes to that file can then be made:

{
  "id": "Justin C."
  "description": "I am passing the time by letting time pass over me ..."
}

The type of text editor that is used by knife can be configured by adding an entry to your config.rb file, or by setting an EDITOR environment variable. For example, to configure knife to open the vim text editor, add the following to your config.rb file:

knife[:editor] = "/usr/bin/vim"

When a Microsoft Windows file path is enclosed in a double-quoted string (” “), the same backslash character (\) that is used to define the file path separator is also used in Ruby to define an escape character. The config.rb file is a Ruby file; therefore, file path separators must be escaped. In addition, spaces in the file path must be replaced with ~1 so that the length of each section within the file path is not more than 8 characters. For example, if EditPad Pro is the text editor of choice and is located at the following path:

C:\\Program Files (x86)\EditPad Pro\EditPad.exe

the setting in the config.rb file would be similar to:

knife[:editor] = "C:\\Progra~1\\EditPa~1\\EditPad.exe"

One approach to working around the double- vs. single-quote issue is to put the single-quotes outside of the double-quotes. For example, for Notepad++:

knife[:editor] = '"C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" -nosession -multiInst'

for Sublime Text:

knife[:editor] = '"C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 2\sublime_text.exe" --wait'

for TextPad:

knife[:editor] = '"C:\Program Files (x86)\TextPad 7\TextPad.exe"'

and for vim:

knife[:editor] = '"C:\Program Files (x86)\vim\vim74\gvim.exe"'

Using Quotes

The text editor command cannot include spaces that are not properly wrapped in quotes. The command can be entered with double quotes (” “) or single quotes (‘ ‘), but this should be done consistently as shown in the examples above.