Feature Request: run against a real chef server

[rj-reilly]

From the documentation it looks like chef-workstation only runs against local cookbooks:

 <RECIPE>          The recipe to converge. This can be provided as one of:
                    1. Full path to a recipe file
                    2. Cookbook name. First we check the working directory for this
                       cookbook, then we check in the chef repository path. If a
                       cookbook is found we run the default recipe.
                    3. This behaves similarly to 'cookbook name' above, but it also allows
                       you to specify which recipe to use from the cookbook.

It would be awesome to also be able to use against a chef server, i think it would only work against already bootstrapped nodes, unless workstation is modified to also have the ability to bootstrap. I know there is knife ssh but i think chef workstation is a better interface and the idea of a inventory file to come is great for orchestration. we currently do this with ansible as i have found it easier to use than knife ssh for our use case for blue green deployments.

[cheeseplus]

As we think about how we re-frame interactions in the context of Workstation we've definitely had the same thought. The challenge here is to align it with or supplant other tooling while still keeping a targeted focus on simplicity, usability, and safety (guiding principles of this initiative). Which is to say this is a good one and we're already thinking about how to do this best.

[robbkidd]

🤔

@rj-reilly In the meantime, can you share more of your thoughts? In what ways do you find chef-run a better interface than knife ssh for initiating a chef-client run on multiple hosts already managed with a Chef Server?

[rj-reilly]

@robbkidd I guess two things one is the hostname globbing, second is not having to execute a search when I am trying to put our blue cluster in to production and remove our green, again currently we do this with ansible ( which pains me ) but we have found it to be faster sans the lookup. I am sure there are knife ssh options i may be missing, but i saw the demo at chef conf started playing around with chef-run and liked it.

[cheeseplus]

Moved/combined into chef/chef-apply#41