Share your chef's knife.rb config with vagrant

We use Chef Server for our provisioning and we use Vagrant for local development and testing. But why should I configure my chef provisioning two times? Wouldn't it be nice to have a project specific knife.rb which vagrant can use? Here it is.

knife.rb

My knife.rb usually contains some logging config and the chef configuration. You can add your cloud api keys here as well.

# Logging.
log_level :debug
log_location STDOUT

# Chef server configuration.
chef_server_url "#{ENV['KNIFE_CHEF_SERVER']}"
client_key "#{ENV['KNIFE_CLIENT_KEY']}"
node_name "#{ENV['KNIFE_NODE_NAME']}"
validation_client_name "#{ENV['KNIFE_VALIDATION_CLIENT_NAME']}"
validation_key "#{ENV['KNIFE_VALIDATION_CLIENT_KEY']}"

The knife.rb gets the necessary data from environment variables. This way I can safely commit the knife.rb to my DVCS and it doesn't collide with my coworkers configs.

Environment variables

You can add the environment variables to your .profile or .bash_profile:

# Opscode chef configurations.
export KNIFE_CHEF_SERVER="https://chef-api.example.com"
export KNIFE_CLIENT_KEY="$HOME/.chef/client.pem"
export KNIFE_NODE_NAME="myclient"
export KNIFE_VALIDATION_CLIENT_NAME="chef-validator"
export KNIFE_VALIDATION_CLIENT_KEY="$HOME/.chef/chef-validator.pem"

Vagrantfile

Now it's time to add some code to your Vagrantfile. On the very top, add those two lines:

require 'chef'
Chef::Config.from_file(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '.chef', 'knife.rb'))

This will load the chef configuration from the knife.rb located in your projects .chef directory.

The chef server provisioning for your vagrant box then might look like this:

config.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef|
    chef.chef_server_url = Chef::Config[:chef_server_url]
    chef.log_level = Chef::Config[:log_level]
    chef.validation_key_path = Chef::Config[:validation_key]
    chef.validation_client_name = Chef::Config[:validation_client_name]
    run_list = ['role[base]']
end

That's it. I now can use one knife.rb config for both my local vagrant machines as well as for production use.