trickyearlobe / gnife

An aftermarket command line client for Chef Infra server

GNIFE CLI

Gnife is an after-market command line client for Chef Infra server written in GoLang. It's pretty lightweight and fast compared to the official knife utility from Progress (formerly Chef or Opscode).

Right now it's a work in progress so:-

• it doesn't have much of the functionality of the official client
• it doesn't have much in the way of error checking implemented yet
• it is probably full of terribly dangerous bugs

GNIFE Installation

• You will need a working version of GO installed for your operating system.
• You will need a working version of GIT configured to be able to access github

First grab the code

# Cloning with SSH
git clone [e-mail]:trickyearlobe/gnife.git

# Cloning with HTTPS
git clone https://github.com/trickyearlobe/gnife.git

Then build the code

cd gnife
go install

Then make sure that the installed binaries are in your PATH. You can check your GOPATH using

go env GOPATH

On my Mac I added this line to my .bash_profile in my home directory

export PATH="$PATH:$GOPATH/bin"

Configuring

gnife uses the standard ~/.chef/credentials file to define profiles, and uses the ~/.chef/context file to select which profile is active.

gnife completely ignores the older style client.rb, knife.rb and config.rb files.

The credentials file usually looks something like this

[richard-prod]
client_name = "richard"
client_key = "/Users/richard/.chef/richard.api.chef.io.pem"
chef_server_url = "https://api.chef.io/organizations/richard-prod"
ssl_no_verify = false
cookbook_path = "~/repos/github/trickyearlobe/prod/cookbooks"

[richard-home]
client_name = "richard"
client_key = "/Users/richard/.chef/richard.chef.local.pem"
chef_server_url = "https://chef.local/organizations/richard-test"
ssl_no_verify = true
cookbook_path = "~/repos/github/trickyearlobe/test/cookbooks"

See Setting up Knife - Profiles for more info on using a credentials file.

Using

Get a list of things gnife can do

richard@beastie > gnife

An after-market command line client for Chef Infra Server

Usage:
  gnife [command]

Available Commands:
  client      Commands for manipulating clients
  completion  Generate the autocompletion script for the specified shell
  help        Help about any command
  node        Commands for manipulating nodes
  raw         Perform raw API operations

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for gnife

Use "gnife [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Getting a list of nodes

gnife node list