Chef Waiter Cookbook

This cookbook will install and configure the Chef waiter service on both windows and linux servers.

What is the chef waiter

The chef-waiter service is a wrapper around chef that will add an API to the chef client to allow runs and reporting.

See Chef Waiter on GitHub for more details.

How to use the cookbook

1. Set the version of chef waiter to be installed in your environment files.
2. Set any configuration values you want.
3. Turn on the install toggle.
4. Include chef-waiter in your cookbook or runlist.

See below for attributes.

Configuring the cookbook

Downloading Chef Waiter

Chef waiter is downloaded from Github releases.

These attributes do this.

Attribute	Type	Example value
node['chef-waiter']['version']	String	"1.0.15"
node['chef-waiter']['url_base']	String	This is the git releases page. Change only if you fork the project.

Feature toggles

The cookbook works using the prinicple of feature toggles. The following feature toggles are available to you.

Attribute	Type	Example value	Description
node['chef-waiter']['feature']['enabled']	Bool	true	Run the code to install and remove chef waiter.
node['chef-waiter']['feature']['manage_firewall']	Bool	true	Run the code to add or remove the firewall rules for chef waiter.
node['chef-waiter']['feature']['deploy_config_file']	Bool	true	Deploy an optional configuration files with supplied values.
node['chef-waiter']['remove']	Bool	false	Install or remove the chef waiter.

Where does it go

The cookbook uses the following values to download and install the chef waiter.

When downloading the files the cookbook tries to tidy up after itself and remove any temp files at the end of the run.

Attribute	Type	Example value	Description
node['chef-waiter']['config_dir']	String	"/etc/chefwaiter" or "c:/Program Files/chefwaiter"	Where to put the configuration file.
node['chef-waiter']['binary_path']	String	"/usr/local/bin" or "c:/Program Files/chefwaiter"	Where to put the binary.
node['chef-waiter']['logs_path']	String	"/var/log/chefwaiter" or "c:/logs/chefwaiter"	Where should chef waiter store log files.
node['chef-waiter']['download_directory']	String	"/tmp" or "c:/temp"	where should chef download the files to while installing.

Configuration file values

All values under the node['chef-waiter']['config_file'] attribute will be pushed into the configuration file.

Chef makes no attempt to valid these values, so make sure they are correct.

Example:

This:

node['chef-waiter']['config_file']['state_table_size'] = 40
node['chef-waiter']['config_file']['periodic_chef_runs'] = true
node['chef-waiter']['config_file']['run_interval'] = 30

Will equal this:

{
  "state_table_size": 40,
  "periodic_chef_runs": true,
  "run_interval": 30
}

Supported Operating Systems

The cookbook tested to support the following OSs.

• Windows 2012
• CentOS 6
• CentOS 7
• Ubuntu 18.04

It could work on other OSs but has not been tested.

Contributing

Fork, Change, Test and submit PR.