If you're new to Chef, you may be wondering how best it is to start with your journey after searching the web and finding it full of thousands of materials, many of which are outdated and rely on end-of-life ChefDK and Chef Manage instead of modern Chef Workstation and Chef Automate.
This short blog post explains how to get your hands dirty with Chef by pointing you to online resources with relevant – and current – technical information.
- The first thing to understand is the terminology used in the Chef DevOps world. This glossary on the main docs.chef.io website will get you up to speed quickly, and you can explore the rest of the site for specific details on Chef tools.
- Next is Chef Workstation, a free download that gives you everything you need to get started with Chef Infra, Chef InSpec, Chef Habitat, Test Kitchen, and Cookstyle. It allows you to perform ad hoc remote execution, scan, create cookbooks, profiles, and other Chef content, and use robust, dependency, and testing software — all in one package. Download Workstation here.
- Learn Chef is the place to go, starting with the basic course Chef 101. Learn Chef has classes and tracks you can follow that lead you to Chef Certification. Hands-on labs and examples are a great way to better understand what Chef software is and why automation is essential in the modern world.
- Once you understand Chef basics, you can continue in Learn Chef to understand more advanced use cases made possible with Chef Automate. Automate is an enterprise platform that allows Chef developers, operations, and security engineers to collaborate effortlessly on delivering application and infrastructure changes at the speed of the business scale.
- Armed with the knowledge of Chef basics and Chef Automate, you can get into some real-life scenarios by looking at the Chef Infra 101: The Road to Best Practices guide. It walks you through installing and using Workstation with Chef Infra Server and Chef Automate, creating a sample cookbook, and more.
- If you like videos that walk you through Chef technology, visit the Chef YouTube channel. It includes hands-on video examples, recorded sessions with real Chef practitioners, and content from ChefConf.
- If you get stuck on a technical issue, visit the Chef forum for answers. It's a great way to reach out to Chef engineers and community members and find solutions to common problems.
- Visit our blog page for the latest Chef news, product releases, ideas, tips, and tricks. Chef engineering teams also regularly publish release notes, such as the latest on Chef Infra Client. Release notes on other products are also regularly updated.
Conclusion
I hope you find this list helpful as you head out on your Chef journey. You can return to the recommended sites again and again to get answers to your Chef's questions.
