[chef] Re: add chef-client cookbook to chef bootstrap

[Bryan McLellan < >]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 11:00 PM, John Wong 
<
 >
 wrote:
> Why isn't this the default behaviour through bootstrap?
> Actually, forget about the base.rb. Why isn't the init thing part of the
> chef setup? If a user wants to change it to upstart or whatever, there
> should be a configuration / manually set it. But not knowing that
> chef-client will not start automatically seems odd. Also, putting it inside
> /opt/chef/ is also weird. I use Ubuntu 10.04 btw.

Chef isn't configured to run automatically out of the Omnibus
installer (which is what you get by default from knife bootstrap now)
because there is more than one way to daemonize chef and different
users have different use cases and preferences.

Some users prefer it just run out of init in its own daemonized mode,
some use cron heavily and thus use cron to schedule chef runs, some
prefer the monitoring capabilities of something like runit. Some folks
prefer to just run chef-client by hand or using knife ssh, some use a
separate orchestration tool. Often, the same people will use two of
these methods for running chef. In the future, there will be more. If
you force Chef to use one of these methods, then using another method
means you have to undo everything that set up the out of box method,
which is messy and unnecessary.

Some users won't want Chef to start immediately on reboot because they
may want to wait for the server to stabilize or may plan to continue
maintenance. Usually we prefer to not configure a particular feature
than force a choice on a user, making them have to use a multiple step
undo recipe just to get back to a clean slate to configure the server
the way they want.

The Omnibus installer installs to /opt/chef because it contains
embedded versions of software like ruby and this is the traditional
location for installing large vendor packages. That you think this
location is weird echoes the first point, there are many ways to do it
and you should be able to change them.

You can find more information on Omnibus here:
http://www.opscode.com/blog/2012/06/29/omnibus-chef-packaging/

Bryan