chef roles

ROLES

A role is a way to define certain patterns and processes that exist across nodes in an organization as belonging to a single job function

Up until this point, we have assigned recipes to be run for each node. Instead of updating run_list for a node all we have to do is update a role on the server. Prevents us from having to manually touch all nodes that need the change. A role is essentially a listing of recipes and attributes that are to be executed on a node Instead of assigning a run list for each node we assign the node a role. A base role can be assigned inside of a role run_list 

Role management with the knife:

Knife role create role_name Chef-repo/roles/rolename.rb

Knife role from chef-repo/roles/rolename.rb Knife role list –w

Knife role delete role_name

Create a Role

#mkdir roles

# ls

Apache2 chefignore httpd motd php roles starter

Navigate to the roles directory and create a file webserver.rb as follows:

#cat webserver.rb

name "webserver"

description "apache web server role"

run_list "recipe[apache]"

Now add this webserver.rb file to the run list as apache and local users and upload it:

#knife role from file webserver.rb 

Updated Role webserver