[chef] Re: Installation instructions for offline install on RHEL

["John E. Vincent (lusis)" < >]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Meppiel, Josh
<
 >
 wrote:
> Are there instructions for the installation of Chef on a RHEL 5.4/5.5 box
> without access to the internet?  All instructions I see on the OpsCode
> website, including those for installation from source, dictate that the host
> has direct access to the internet.  I would be fine with installation from
> source, tarball explode, or RPM’s.
>
>
>
> -Josh

I've been in your shoes, not just with Chef.

You have a couple of options
- Package the gems into RPMS yourself and install them (along with
config files that way)
- Create a local gem server to host the gems and point all of your nodes there

If you're planning on using 'knife bootstrap', take a look at the
bootstrap templates. That's where you're going to get the most
flexibility and you'll understand exactly what happens when a node is
bootstrapped. Here's an example:

https://gist.github.com/765086

You can see all of the templates available in
'lib/chef/knife/bootstrap' where your chef gems were installed
locally. You'll probably need to create a custom one, copy it to the
.chef directory of your local chef repo and then bootstrap a new node
like so:

knife bootstrap FQDN  -N nickname -i <ssh key file> -x root -d <my
custom bootstrap template without.rb>  -r "role[base]"

So esssentially, you would want to modify the steps in the first part
of the gist to pull everything from a local repository.

If you want to run your own gem server, see here:

http://docs.rubygems.org/read/chapter/18

John