I am playing around with orchestration and set mysef the challenge to:
- build a chef server
- build loads of nodes after that that are configured by the chef server
The issue is that the chef server will need to be built with all the relevant cookbooks that I need to configure the rest of the environment. Since it seems a bit silly to git clone a whole bunch of stuff on the chef server, then do a knife cookbook upload to localhost, I was wondering if cookbooks where simple directories somewhere on the filesystem of the chef server, so that one could simply download a single repo as part of an instance being built, and drop all the cookbooks into a location, which the chef server would then "host". I have searched high and low on Ubuntu 12.04 and chef server v11.12.8, but haven't been able to find any files whatsoever, despite having one recipe present on the server (which I can see in the cookbook list).
I am starting to think they are stored in some other format (perhaps binary), which would mean that I can't achieve what I want in the way that I want.
Has anyone come across the files before?
Also, I have already seen this, which didn't really help: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15330678/where-are-the-cookbooks-stored-in-chef-server