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

[Jesse Nelson < >]

I've moved to using bundler to package all the chef gems into an rpm to make
monolithic chef-client and chef-server rpm's. This is serving us well, and
way simpler to manage if you want to track the chef gem releases faster.
Happy to share the src rpm's if there's interest. It's just a Gemfile and a
spec per project (client/server).



On 1/4/11 9:46 AM, "John E. Vincent (lusis)" 
<
 >
wrote:

> 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 RPM¹s.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -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