Installing ChefDK on your local Windows system with Chocolately

Recently, I have been working with Chef Automation. Chef, as pulled directly from their literature:

lets you manage ... all (servers) by turning infrastructure into code. Infrastructure described as code is flexible, versionable, human-readable, and testable. Whether your infrastructure is in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid environment, you can easily and quickly adapt to your business’s changing needs with Chef

As described in the pull quote above the benefit of Chef is that everyone from infrastructure engineer to developer will write their product through code which can be version controlled and deployed on both your internal (on-premise) and external (cloud) solutions.

It's a very powerful tool with huge ramifications for fledgling or aging organizations.

Before we get to deep into the woods on Chef, the philosophy of infrastructure through code, and all the tools chef opens up to an organization, lets first touch on the installation of the chef developer tools which will henceforth be referred to as ChefDK.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I work in a windows based shop so the following instruction set will be designed specifically with the Microsoft OS in mind. 

The following documentation is written to the current state of the chef system at time of writing. Since Chef at its base is an open source solution it is constantly changing with product need.

Since I am in love with CLI commands and Powershell I avoid the installation guide provided by chef at their website. While these instructions work fantastically well I like to script the great majority of my installations so I can call upon them in the future.

With this in mind I am a huge proponent of Chocolately. Chocolately easily manages all aspects of Windows software (installation, configuration, upgrade, and uninstallation) and makes scripting installs soooo much easier on windows. To install Chocolately:

1. First, ensure that you are using an administrative powershell
2. Run Get-ExecutionPolicy. If it returns Restricted, then run Set-ExecutionPolicy AllSigned or Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass.
3. Now run the following command

4. Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

     

And that's it after the script has completed its run, chocolately will have been installed on your local machine.

From here installing chefdk is as simple as finding the package on the chocolately site:

 From the top right hand corner of https://chocolatey.org/ select "Packages"

 

In the "Search Packages" box type Chef. 

 

We are looking for the Chef Development Kit which is the first selection presented. As we can see in the image above, the chocolately command that we need to run to install this package is choco install chefdk.

 From our powershell window, still running in administrator mode, type the above command. 

After being prompted whether you wish for the package to be installed, you do by the way (hit Y for yes), ChefDK will now be installed for you through the chocolately tool. 

With the chocolately package installed you can quickly upgrade you chefdk installation in the future with choco upgrade chefdk  or easily remove the package with choco uninstall chefdk.