Chef Solo Provisioning (Remote)

Before reading this page, be sure to read the chef solo provisioning.

Chef Solo also allows for an additional option of downloading packaged (tar.gz) cookbooks from a remote URL to provision. This is a bit more complicated than using a local cookbooks path (covered in the chef solo provisioning documentation), but is less complicated than setting up a full blown chef server.

Prior to reading this page, it is recommend that you spend a few minutes reading about running chef solo from a URL. This will allow you to familiarize yourself with the terms used throughout the rest of this page.

Setting the Recipe URL

The first step is specify the recipe URL in the Vagrantfile. This is the URL from which chef solo will download the cookbooks. The Vagrantfile below shows how this is done:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|
    chef.recipe_url = "http://files.vagrantup.com/getting_started/cookbooks.tar.gz"
  end
end

Setting the Cookbooks Path

Next, you must specify the paths within the downloaded package where the cookbooks are. By default, Vagrant assumes they’re in a top-level “cookbooks” directory within the package, but sometimes you may include other directories, such as “site-cookbooks” which you must manually specify.

To tell Vagrant what the cookbook path is, you use the same config.chef.cookbooks_path setting, but with a little extra formatting to let Vagrant know you’re describing a path on the VM, and not on the host machine.

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|
    chef.cookbooks_path = [:vm, "cookbooks"]
  end
end

You may also use an array to specify multiple cookbook paths.

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|
    chef.cookbooks_path = ["local-cookbooks", [:vm, "cookbooks"]]
  end
end

Enabling and Executing

Now that everything is setup, provisioning the VM is the same as always: if you’re building the VM from scratch, just run vagrant up. Otherwise, run vagrant reload to simply restart the VM, provisioning in the process.