There’s a theme developing here, seeing as how my last article was about this as well.

I’m now up to three Chef environments I’m responsible for, running on different servers and repositories, and updating the previous config was getting to be a pain. So, here’s the new one. I should put it on GitHub or something, but at the moment it lives in my config files repository which is also full of SSH keys and other things I don’t want to give you. Thankfully Chef 0.9.10 has support for directory specific knife configs, which will mean I can stop hacking this stuff together.

Start off with something like this in /.chef/knife.rb

CHEF_ENV = ENV['CHEF_ENV'] || "your_environment"
env_config = YAML.load_file("#{ENV['HOME']}/.chef/#{CHEF_ENV}/config.yml")

client_key               "#{ENV['HOME']}/.chef/#{CHEF_ENV}/user.pem"
validation_key           "#{ENV['HOME']}/.chef/#{CHEF_ENV}/validator.pem"
chef_server_url          env_config["server"]
log_level                :info
log_location             STDOUT
node_name                env_config["node_name"]
validation_client_name   env_config["validator"] || "chef-validator"
cache_type               'BasicFile'
cache_options( :path => "#{ENV['HOME']}/.chef/#{CHEF_ENV}/checksums" )
cookbook_path            ["#{env_config["path"]}/cookbooks", "#{env_config["path"]}/site_cookbooks"]

knife({
  :rackspace_api_username => env_config["rackspace"]["username"],
  :rackspace_api_key  => env_config["rackspace"]["api_key"],
  :environment => env_config["environment"] 
})

And then in ~/.chef/your_environment/config.yml put something like this:

node_name: "jon"
server: "https://api.opscode.com/organizations/client"
path: "/Users/jon/Work/Client/Chef"
environment: "production"
validator: "validator"
rackspace:
  username: "username"
  api_key: "api_key"

And copy your validation key to ~/.chef/your_environment/validator.pem and the user key to ~/.chef/your_environment/user.pem – after that, all should work. Pick your environment by setting CHEF_ENV, for example:

CHEF_ENV=other_client knife node list