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Install Chef in an air-gapped environment

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This guide will show you how to run a fully functional Chef environment within an air-gapped network.

Prerequisites

Since a variety of different practices are used to create an air-gapped network, this guide focuses solely on the implementation of Chef software - as such, it makes the following assumptions:

  • You have a way to get packages to your air-gapped machines
  • Machines on your air-gapped network are able to resolve each other via DNS
  • A server’s Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) is the name that will be used by other servers to access it
  • You have a private Ruby gem mirror to supply gems as needed
  • You have an artifact store for file downloads. At a minimum, it should have the following packages available:
    • Chef Workstation
    • Chef Infra Client
    • Chef Supermarket
    • An install script for Chef Infra Client

Required cookbooks

This guide will link to the required cookbooks for each piece of software in that software’s respective section, but this is a full list of the cookbooks required to complete the entire guide:

For Chef Supermarket:

Required Gems

The following Ruby gems are required to install private Supermarket via the supermarket-omnibus-cookbook:

  • mixlib-install
  • mixlib-shellout
  • mixlib-versioning
  • artifactory

These should be accessible from your Gem mirror.

Create an install script

An install script is used to install Chef Infra Client when bootstrapping a new node. It simply pulls the Chef Infra Client package from your artifact store, and then installs it. For example, on Debian-based Linux systems, it would look similar to this:

#!/bin/bash

cd /tmp/
wget http://packages.example.com/chef_13.2.20-1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i chef_13.2.20-1_amd64.deb

The install script should be accessible from your artifact store.

Chef Infra Server

In this section you’ll install the Chef Infra Server, and create your organization and user. Note that in order to configure Supermarket later in this guide, you will need a user that is a member of the admins group.

  1. Download the package from https://downloads.chef.io/chef-server/.

  2. Upload the package to the machine that will run the Chef Infra Server, and then record its location on the file system. The rest of these steps assume this location is in the /tmp directory.

  3. As a root user, install the Chef Infra Server package on the server, using the name of the package provided by Chef. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS:

    sudo rpm -Uvh /tmp/chef-server-core-<version>.rpm

    For Ubuntu:

    sudo dpkg -i /tmp/chef-server-core-<version>.deb

    After a few minutes, the Chef Infra Server will be installed.

  4. Run the following to start all of the services:

    sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure

    Because the Chef Infra Server is composed of many different services that work together to create a functioning system, this step may take a few minutes to complete.

  5. Run the following command to create an administrator:

    sudo chef-server-ctl user-create USER_NAME FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME EMAIL 'PASSWORD' --filename FILE_NAME

    An RSA private key is generated automatically. This is the user’s private key and should be saved to a safe location. The --filename option will save the RSA private key to the specified absolute path.

    For example:

    sudo chef-server-ctl user-create janedoe Jane Doe janed@example.com 'abc123' --filename /path/to/janedoe.pem

  6. Run the following command to create an organization:

    sudo chef-server-ctl org-create short_name 'full_organization_name' --association_user user_name --filename ORGANIZATION-validator.pem

    For example:

    sudo chef-server-ctl org-create 4thcafe 'Fourth Cafe, Inc.' --association_user janedoe --filename /path/to/4thcafe-validator.pem

    The name must begin with a lower-case letter or digit, may only contain lower-case letters, digits, hyphens, and underscores, and must be between 1 and 255 characters. For example: 4thcafe.

    The full name must begin with a non-white space character and must be between 1 and 1023 characters. For example: 'Fourth Cafe, Inc.'.

    The --association_user option will associate the user_name with the admins security group on the Chef Infra Server.

    An RSA private key is generated automatically. This is the chef-validator key and should be saved to a safe location. The --filename option will save the RSA private key to the specified absolute path.

Chef Workstation

Install Chef Workstation

  1. First, install the Chef Workstation installer package. Use the appropriate tool to run the installer:

    dpkg -i chef-workstation_0.14.16-1_amd64.deb

  2. Use the chef generate repo command to generate your Chef repo:

    chef generate repo chef-repo

  3. Within your Chef repo, create a .chef directory:

    mkdir /chef-repo/.chef

  4. Copy the USER.pem and ORGANIZATION.pem files from the server, and move them into the .chef directory.

    scp ssh-user@chef-server.example.com:/path/to/pem/files /chef-repo/.chef/

Create a bootstrap template

By default, knife bootstrap uses the chef-full template to bootstrap a node. This template contains a number of useful features, but it also attempts to pull an installation script from downloads.chef.io. In this section, you’ll copy the contents of the chef-full template to a custom template, and then modify the package and Ruby gem sources.

  1. Navigate to the .chef directory, and create a bootstrap directory within it:

    mkdir bootstrap

  2. Move to the bootstrap directory and create a blank template file; this example will use airgap.erb for the template name:

    touch airgap.erb

  3. Still in the bootstrap directory, issue the following command to copy the chef-full configuration to your new template:

    find /opt/chef-workstation/embedded/lib/ruby -type f -name chef-full.erb -exec cat {} \; > airgap.erb

    This command searches for the chef-full template file under /opt/chef-workstation/embedded/lib/ruby, and then outputs the contents of the file to airgap.erb. If you used a different template file name, be sure to replace airgap.erb with the template file you created during the last step.

  4. Update airgap.erb to replace omnitruck.chef.io with the URL of install.sh on your artifact store:

    install_sh="<%= knife_config[:bootstrap_url] ? knife_config[:bootstrap_url] : "http://packages.example.com/install.sh" %>"

  5. Still in your text editor, locate the following line near the bottom of your airgap.erb file:

    cat > /etc/chef/client.rb <<'EOP'
<%= config_content %>
EOP

    Beneath it, add the following, replacing gems.example.com with the URL of your gem mirror:

    cat >> /etc/chef/client.rb <<'EOP'
rubygems_url "http://gems.example.com"
EOP

    This appends the appropriate rubygems_url setting to the /etc/chef/client.rb file that is created during bootstrap, which ensures that your nodes use your internal gem mirror.

Configure knife

Within the .chef directory, create a config.rb file and replace USER and ORGANIZATION with the user and organization that you created on your Chef Infra Server; replace chef-server.example.com with your Chef Infra Server URL:

current_dir = File.dirname(__FILE__)
log_level                :info
log_location             STDOUT
node_name                'USER'
client_key               "#{current_dir}/USER.pem"
validation_client_name   'ORGANIZATION-validator'
validation_key           "#{current_dir}/ORGANIZATION.pem"
chef_server_url          'https://chef-server.example.com/organizations/ORGANIZATION'
cache_type               'BasicFile'
cache_options( :path => "#{ENV['HOME']}/.chef/checksums" )
cookbook_path            ["#{current_dir}/../cookbooks"]
knife[:bootstrap_template] = "#{current_dir}/bootstrap/airgap.erb"

The knife[:bootstrap_template] option in this example allows you to specify the template that knife bootstrap will use by default when bootstrapping a node. It should point to your custom template within the bootstrap directory.

Now that knife is configured, copy the SSL certificates from your Chef Infra Server to your trusted certificates:

knife ssl fetch

Private Supermarket

Private Supermarket allows you to host your own internal version of the Chef Supermarket within your air-gapped network.

Requirements

In this section, you will use a wrapper around the supermarket-omnibus-cookbook to install private Supermarket. The Supermarket cookbook depends upon the following cookbooks:

The following Gems must be accessible via your Gem mirror:

  • mixlib-install
  • mixlib-shellout
  • mixlib-versioning
  • artifactory

Your cookbooks directory must have all three of these cookbooks installed before you will be able to use the Supermarket cookbook wrapper. In addition the necessary cookbooks, a private Chef Supermarket has the following requirements:

  • An operational Chef Infra Server (version 12.0 or higher) to act as the OAuth 2.0 provider
  • A user account on the Chef Infra Server with admins privileges
  • A key for the user account on the Chef server
  • An x86_64 compatible Linux host with at least 1 GB memory
  • System clocks synchronized on the Chef Infra Server and Supermarket hosts
  • Sufficient disk space to meet project cookbook storage capacity or credentials to store cookbooks in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket

Configure credentials

First, you’ll configure Chef Identity credentials for Supermarket. Chef Identity is an OAuth 2.0 service packaged with the Chef Infra Server, that allows you to use the same credentials to access both server and Supermarket.

  1. Log on to the Chef Infra Server via SSH and elevate to an admin-level user. If running a multi-node Chef Infra Server cluster, log on to the node acting as the primary node in the cluster.

  2. Update the /etc/opscode/chef-server.rb configuration file.

    To define OAuth 2 information for Chef Supermarket, create a Hash similar to:

    oc_id['applications'] ||= {}
oc_id['applications']['supermarket'] = {
  'redirect_uri' => 'https://supermarket.mycompany.com/auth/chef_oauth2/callback',
}

  3. Reconfigure the Chef Infra Server.

    sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure

  4. Retrieve Supermarket’s OAuth 2.0 client credentials:

    Depending on your Chef Infra Server version and configuration (see chef-server.rb), this can be retrieved via chef-server-ctl oc-id-show-app supermarket or is located in /etc/opscode/oc-id-applications/supermarket.json:

    {
  "name": "supermarket",
  "uid": "0bad0f2eb04e935718e081fb71asdfec3681c81acb9968a8e1e32451d08b",
  "secret": "17cf1141cc971a10ce307611beda7ffadstr4f1bc98d9f9ca76b9b127879",
  "redirect_uri": "https://supermarket.mycompany.com/auth/chef_oauth2/callback"
}

Create a Wrapper

  1. Generate the cookbook:

    chef generate cookbook my_supermarket_wrapper

  2. Change directories into that cookbook:

    cd my_supermarket_wrapper

  3. Defines the wrapper cookbook’s dependency on the supermarket-omnibus-cookbook cookbook. Open the metadata.rb file of the newly-created cookbook, and then add the following line:

    depends 'supermarket-omnibus-cookbook'

  4. Save and close the metadata.rb file.

  5. Open the /recipes/default.rb recipe located within the newly-generated cookbook and add the following content:

    include_recipe 'supermarket-omnibus-cookbook'

    This ensures that the default.rb file in the supermarket-omnibus-cookbook is run.

Define Attributes

Define the attributes for the Chef Supermarket installation and how it connects to the Chef Infra Server. One approach would be to hard-code attributes in the wrapper cookbook’s default.rb recipe. A better approach is to place these attributes in a data bag, and then reference them from the recipe. For example, the data bag could be named apps and then a data bag item within the data bag could be named supermarket. The following attributes are required:

  • chef_server_url: the url for your chef server.
  • chef_oauth2_app_id: the Chef Identity uid from /etc/opscode/oc-id-applications/supermarket.json
  • chef_oauth2_secret: The Chef Identity secret from /etc/opscode/oc-id-applications/supermarket.json
  • package_url: The location of the Supermarket package on your artifact store

To define these attributes, do the following:

  1. Open the recipes/default.rb file and add the following, before the include_recipe line that was added in the previous step. This example uses a data bag named apps and a data bag item named supermarket:

    app = data_bag_item('apps', 'supermarket')

  2. Set the attributes from the data bag:

    node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['chef_server_url'] = app['chef_server_url']
node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['chef_oauth2_app_id'] = app['chef_oauth2_app_id']
node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['chef_oauth2_secret'] = app['chef_oauth2_secret']
node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['package_url'] = app['package_url']

    Note that the ['package_url'] setting points to the location of the Supermarket package on your artifact store. When finished, the /recipes/default.rb file should have code similar to:

    app = data_bag_item('apps', 'supermarket')

node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['chef_server_url'] = app['chef_server_url']
node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['chef_oauth2_app_id'] = app['chef_oauth2_app_id']
node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['chef_oauth2_secret'] = app['chef_oauth2_secret']

include_recipe 'supermarket-omnibus-cookbook'

    Alternatively, if you chose not to use a data bag to store these values, your default.rb should look similar to this:

    node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['chef_server_url'] = 'https://chef-server.example.com:443'
node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['chef_oauth2_app_id'] = '0bad0f2eb04e935718e081fb71asdfec3681c81acb9968a8e1e32451d08b'
node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['chef_oauth2_secret'] = '17cf1141cc971a10ce307611beda7ffadstr4f1bc98d9f9ca76b9b127879'
node.override['supermarket_omnibus']['package_url'] = 'http://packages.example.com/supermarket_3.1.22-1_amd64.deb'


include_recipe 'supermarket-omnibus-cookbook'

  3. Save and close the recipes/default.rb file.

  4. Upload all of your cookbooks to the Chef Infra Server:

    knife cookbook upload -a

Bootstrap Supermarket

Bootstrap the node on which Chef Supermarket is to be installed. For example, to bootstrap a node running Ubuntu on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the command is similar to:

knife bootstrap ip_address -N supermarket-node -x ubuntu --sudo

where:

  • -N defines the name of the Chef Supermarket node: supermarket-node
  • -x defines the (ssh) user name: ubuntu
  • --sudo ensures that sudo is used while running commands on the node during the bootstrap operation

When the bootstrap operation is finished, do the following:

  1. Add the wrapper cookbook’s /recipes/default.rb recipe to the run-list:

    knife node run_list set supermarket-node recipe[my_supermarket_wrapper::default]

    where supermarket-node is the name of the node that was just bootstrapped.

  2. Start Chef Infra Client on the newly-bootstrapped Chef Supermarket node. For example, using SSH:

    ssh ubuntu@your-supermarket-node-public-dns

  3. After accessing the Chef Supermarket node, run Chef Infra Client:

    sudo chef-client

Connect to Supermarket

To reach the newly spun up private Chef Supermarket, the hostname must be resolvable from a workstation. For production use, the hostname should have a DNS entry in an appropriate domain that is trusted by each user’s workstation.

  1. Visit the Chef Supermarket hostname in the browser. A private Chef Supermarket will generate and use a self-signed certificate, if a certificate is not supplied as part of the installation process (via the wrapper cookbook).
  2. If an SSL notice is shown due to your self-signed certificate while connecting to Chef Supermarket via a web browser, accept the SSL certificate. A trusted SSL certificate should be used for private Chef Supermarket that is used in production.
  3. After opening Chef Supermarket in a web browser, click the Create Account link. A prompt to log in to the Chef Infra Server is shown. Authorize the Chef Supermarket to use the Chef Infra Server account for authentication.

Note

The redirect URL specified for Chef Identity MUST match the FQDN hostname of the Chef Supermarket server. The URI must also be correct: /auth/chef_oauth2/callback. Otherwise, an error message similar to The redirect uri included is not valid. will be shown.

Configuration updates

Knife

Update the config.rb file on your workstation to use your private Supermarket:

knife[:supermarket_site] = 'https://supermarket.example.com'

Berkshelf

If you’re using Berkshelf, update your Berksfile to replace https://supermarket.chef.io with the URL of your private Supermarket:

source 'https://supermarket.example.com'

Upload cookbooks to Supermarket

To upload new cookbooks to your private Supermarket, use the knife supermarket share command on your workstation:

knife supermarket share chef-ingredient

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