Installation instructions for offline install on RHEL

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Are there instructions for the installation of Chef on a RHEL 5.4/5.5 box without access to the internet? All instructions I see on the OpsCode website, including those for installation from source, dictate that the host has direct access to the internet. I would be fine with installation from source, tarball explode, or RPM’s.

-Josh

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2

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Meppiel, Josh
josh_meppiel@mastercard.com wrote:

Are there instructions for the installation of Chef on a RHEL 5.4/5.5 box
without access to the internet? All instructions I see on the OpsCode
website, including those for installation from source, dictate that the host
has direct access to the internet. I would be fine with installation from
source, tarball explode, or RPM’s.

-Josh

I've been in your shoes, not just with Chef.

You have a couple of options

  • Package the gems into RPMS yourself and install them (along with
    config files that way)
  • Create a local gem server to host the gems and point all of your nodes there

If you're planning on using 'knife bootstrap', take a look at the
bootstrap templates. That's where you're going to get the most
flexibility and you'll understand exactly what happens when a node is
bootstrapped. Here's an example:

You can see all of the templates available in
'lib/chef/knife/bootstrap' where your chef gems were installed
locally. You'll probably need to create a custom one, copy it to the
.chef directory of your local chef repo and then bootstrap a new node
like so:

knife bootstrap FQDN -N nickname -i -x root -d -r "role[base]"

So esssentially, you would want to modify the steps in the first part
of the gist to pull everything from a local repository.

If you want to run your own gem server, see here:

http://docs.rubygems.org/read/chapter/18

John

3

I've moved to using bundler to package all the chef gems into an rpm to make
monolithic chef-client and chef-server rpm's. This is serving us well, and
way simpler to manage if you want to track the chef gem releases faster.
Happy to share the src rpm's if there's interest. It's just a Gemfile and a
spec per project (client/server).

On 1/4/11 9:46 AM, "John E. Vincent (lusis)" lusis.org+chef-list@gmail.com
wrote:

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Meppiel, Josh
josh_meppiel@mastercard.com wrote:

Are there instructions for the installation of Chef on a RHEL 5.4/5.5 box
without access to the internet? All instructions I see on the OpsCode
website, including those for installation from source, dictate that the host
has direct access to the internet. I would be fine with installation from
source, tarball explode, or RPM¹s.

-Josh

I've been in your shoes, not just with Chef.

You have a couple of options

  • Package the gems into RPMS yourself and install them (along with
    config files that way)
  • Create a local gem server to host the gems and point all of your nodes there

If you're planning on using 'knife bootstrap', take a look at the
bootstrap templates. That's where you're going to get the most
flexibility and you'll understand exactly what happens when a node is
bootstrapped. Here's an example:

A sample centos5 chef bootstrap template from Ruby gems · GitHub

You can see all of the templates available in
'lib/chef/knife/bootstrap' where your chef gems were installed
locally. You'll probably need to create a custom one, copy it to the
.chef directory of your local chef repo and then bootstrap a new node
like so:

knife bootstrap FQDN -N nickname -i -x root -d -r "role[base]"

So esssentially, you would want to modify the steps in the first part
of the gist to pull everything from a local repository.

If you want to run your own gem server, see here:

http://docs.rubygems.org/read/chapter/18

John

4

Also be aware of RHEL/CentOS sudoers (env_reset) PATH issues:
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/User+Environment+PATH+Sanity

The Chef Providers and Ohai plugins relies on the PATH being set correctly as they do not hardcode paths when running system commands. We do this because we don't want to make assumptions about where programs might live for every single platform.

-Seth

--
Opscode, Inc.
Seth Chisamore, Technical Evangelist
T: (404) 348-0505 E: schisamo@opscode.com
Twitter, IRC, Github: schisamo

On Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 12:46 PM, John E. Vincent (lusis) wrote:

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Meppiel, Josh
josh_meppiel@mastercard.com wrote:

Are there instructions for the installation of Chef on a RHEL 5.4/5.5 box
without access to the internet? All instructions I see on the OpsCode
website, including those for installation from source, dictate that the host
has direct access to the internet. I would be fine with installation from
source, tarball explode, or RPM’s.

-Josh

I've been in your shoes, not just with Chef.

You have a couple of options

  • Package the gems into RPMS yourself and install them (along with
    config files that way)
  • Create a local gem server to host the gems and point all of your nodes there

If you're planning on using 'knife bootstrap', take a look at the
bootstrap templates. That's where you're going to get the most
flexibility and you'll understand exactly what happens when a node is
bootstrapped. Here's an example:

A sample centos5 chef bootstrap template from Ruby gems · GitHub

You can see all of the templates available in
'lib/chef/knife/bootstrap' where your chef gems were installed
locally. You'll probably need to create a custom one, copy it to the
.chef directory of your local chef repo and then bootstrap a new node
like so:

knife bootstrap FQDN -N nickname -i -x root -d -r "role[base]"

So esssentially, you would want to modify the steps in the first part
of the gist to pull everything from a local repository.

If you want to run your own gem server, see here:

http://docs.rubygems.org/read/chapter/18

John

5

The "official" way is here:
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs

For offline installation, you'd want to make all the recursive
packages available in a local yum repo.

You can also dig around in here for some goodies:

http://yum.afistfulofservers.net/affs/centos/5/x86_64/

My last attempts at 0.9.12 ended up broken for reasons I can't be
bothered to investigate.
I gave up on 5.x, and and decided to use fedora in anticipation of RHEL6.

Bundlerized Fedora stuff is here:

http://yum.afistfulofservers.net/affs-chef/fedora/12/x86_64/
http://yum.afistfulofservers.net/affs-chef/fedora/13/x86_64/

I'll be updating for RHEL6 once Centos6 makes it out the door.

-s

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:56 PM, SethChisamore schisamo@opscode.com wrote:

Also be aware of RHEL/CentOS sudoers (env_reset) PATH issues:
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/User+Environment+PATH+Sanity
The Chef Providers and Ohai plugins relies on the PATH being set correctly
as they do not hardcode paths when running system commands. We do this
because we don't want to make assumptions about where programs might live
for every single platform.

-Seth

Opscode, Inc.
Seth Chisamore, Technical Evangelist
T: (404) 348-0505 E: schisamo@opscode.com
Twitter, IRC, Github: schisamo

On Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 12:46 PM, John E. Vincent (lusis) wrote:

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Meppiel, Josh
josh_meppiel@mastercard.com wrote:

Are there instructions for the installation of Chef on a RHEL 5.4/5.5 box
without access to the internet? All instructions I see on the OpsCode
website, including those for installation from source, dictate that the host
has direct access to the internet. I would be fine with installation from
source, tarball explode, or RPM’s.

-Josh

I've been in your shoes, not just with Chef.

You have a couple of options

  • Package the gems into RPMS yourself and install them (along with
    config files that way)
  • Create a local gem server to host the gems and point all of your nodes
    there

If you're planning on using 'knife bootstrap', take a look at the
bootstrap templates. That's where you're going to get the most
flexibility and you'll understand exactly what happens when a node is
bootstrapped. Here's an example:

A sample centos5 chef bootstrap template from Ruby gems · GitHub

You can see all of the templates available in
'lib/chef/knife/bootstrap' where your chef gems were installed
locally. You'll probably need to create a custom one, copy it to the
.chef directory of your local chef repo and then bootstrap a new node
like so:

knife bootstrap FQDN -N nickname -i -x root -d -r "role[base]"

So esssentially, you would want to modify the steps in the first part
of the gist to pull everything from a local repository.

If you want to run your own gem server, see here:

http://docs.rubygems.org/read/chapter/18

John