Set up policy

Upload the Chef Desktop Cookbook

Upload the Chef Desktop Cookbook to your Chef Infra Server. From the development environment command line, navigate to the /cookbooks directory and run:

knife cookbook upload <your cookbook name>

Knife and other Chef tools use the cookbook name specified inside of either the metadata.rb file or the policyfile.rb file, which is case sensitive. Naming cookbooks in all lower-case is the easiest way to avoid conflicts with your knife or chef commands.

Now your Chef Infra Server has the cookbook and settings it needs to apply to the nodes.

Configure and upload the Policyfile to Chef Server

Check the Policyfile and apply it to our test nodes. Policies are a convenient strategy for managing nodes. Read more about policies.

Check the Policyfile

Your Chef Desktop Policyfile.rb should look similar to:

name 'desktop-config-lite'

# default_source :supermarket, 'https://supermarket.chef.io' do |s|
#   s.preferred_for 'chef-client'
# end
cookbook 'desktop-config-lite', '~> 1.2.6'

# run_list: chef-client will run these recipes in the order specified.
# cookbook::recipe
run_list 'desktop-config-lite::default'

# Specify a custom source for a single cookbook:
# cookbook 'custom-cookbook', '.'

This will use the desktop-config-lite cookbook from Chef Supermarket and run the default recipe.

Upload the Policyfile

Upload the Policyfile to the Chef Infra Server. Call chef update first to do some needed housekeeping around your policyfile.

If this is the first time that you are using a Policyfile, use the chef install command to generate a lock file:

chef install Policyfile.rb

Run chef update and chef push every time you update the version of your cookbook:

chef update
chef push 'my_Policy_Group' 'Policyfile.rb'