chefdash

chefdash is a simple dashboard for tracking Chef runs across a cluster. View a demo.

With chefdash you can:

• Run chef-client on all nodes in a Chef environment simultaneously, or on a single node
• View output in realtime and quickly see if any nodes failed
• Automatically bootstrap new nodes

Planned Features

• Provide an alternative to the Chef Web UI JSON editor
• Expose knife ssh functionality for arbitrary commands

Install

1. Clone the source and run the install script (only works on Ubuntu for now)

   Warning: the install script attempts to install nginx 1.4 or higher from the nginx deb repo. If you already have an older version of nginx installed, you'll need to remove it. (1.4 is required for websocket proxying)

   sudo apt-get install git
   git clone <source url> chefdash
   cd chefdash
   sudo ./install.sh

   Note: the install script is idempotent, which means if you want to upgrade to the latest chefdash, you can just git pull and run the script again.

2. Login as the newly created chefdash user

   sudo -i -u chefdash

3. Configure access to the Chef server

   If you already have a working knife configuration, just copy your .chef folder into the chefdash home folder (which is /var/lib/chefdash). Otherwise, set up knife according to Opscode's instructions:

   knife configure --initial

4. Configure SSH

   Make sure the chefdash user has the ability to SSH into the nodes as root without a password:

   ssh-keygen
   cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub # Copy this public key into the /root/.ssh/authorized_keys file on each node

   Worried about passwordless root access? Create a chefdash user on each of your nodes, then put this line in the /etc/sudoers file:

   chefdash ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/chef-client

   This will allow the chefdash user to only execute chef-client as root.

   chefdash doesn't know what user to login as on your nodes. Configure SSH to automatically fill in the correct usernames:

   vim ~/.ssh/config
   # Sample configuration telling SSH to login as  user "ubuntu" on all nodes:
   # Host *
   #   User ubuntu

5. Finish up

   exit out of the chefdash shell, then restart the chefdash service:

   sudo service chefdash restart

You're all set!

Bootstrap Setup

chefdash can bootstrap new nodes if you set it up correctly.

1. Install knife

   curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | sudo bash

2. Set up knife

   You'll need the Chef validator key from your Chef server. You can find it in /etc/chef-server/.

   sudo cp chef-validator.pem /var/lib/chefdash/.chef/
   sudo vim /var/lib/chefdash/.chef/knife.rb
   # Set values for validation_client_name and validation_key
   # For example:
   # validation_client_name 'chef-validator'
   # validation_key '/var/lib/chefdash/.chef/chef-validator.pem'

3. Restart chefdash

   sudo service chefdash restart

   You should see a "bootstrap" button on the homepage.

chefdash checks for the existence of knife before enabling the bootstrap button. Don't like it? Just add this line to /etc/chefdash/chefdash.py:

ENABLE_BOOTSTRAP = False