In a previous post I introduced you to provisioning an infrastructure with Chef using a standalone component called Chef Solo. In this post, I’m going to expand significantly on that example and cover how to use Chef in the more common scenario, which is using Chef Client to talk with a Chef Server.

Many testers are working in a DevOps context now or soon will be. This context is often about making a new environment available (virtualization) or taking an environment and making sure it has everything needed (provisioning). Usually these two go hand-in-hand. Here I’m going to show you one of the simplest possible ways to do this using one component of Chef. Make no mistake about it: this kind of automation is critical for the modern tester to learn.