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Chef Infra

Automate infrastructure configuration at scale with Chef Infra

Configuration Management

Chef Infra turns infrastructure into code, enabling consistent, automated configuration, deployment, and management across any environment, from small clusters to massive data centers.

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Overview

Overview

Chef Infra turns infrastructure into code, letting you define the desired state of servers, containers, and cloud resources in a declarative Ruby‑based DSL. The client continuously converges each node to match the recipes, ensuring consistency across development, testing, and production.

Who It’s For & How to Deploy

Designed for operations, DevOps, and platform engineering teams that manage heterogeneous environments—from on‑premises data centers to public clouds. Chef Infra can run standalone against a Chef Server for centralized policy distribution, or in a solo mode for smaller setups. Installation is performed via the chef-client package on supported platforms, and configuration is version‑controlled alongside application code. Comprehensive documentation, a free Learn Chef learning platform, community Slack, mailing lists, and an active issue‑response cadence (≤14 days) help teams adopt and scale the tool quickly.

Highlights

Infrastructure as code using a Ruby‑based DSL
Extensible client that converges nodes to desired state
Integration with Chef Automate for visibility and compliance
Active community with rapid issue and PR response times

Pros

  • Mature platform with a large ecosystem of cookbooks
  • Declarative language simplifies complex configurations
  • Predictable release schedule and active development
  • Extensive documentation and free learning resources

Considerations

  • Steeper learning curve for Ruby DSL newcomers
  • Heavier runtime compared to some lightweight agents
  • Full feature set requires a Chef Server deployment
  • Community contributions can vary in quality

Managed products teams compare with

When teams consider Chef Infra, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.

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Fit guide

Great for

  • Enterprises needing consistent configuration across heterogeneous environments
  • Teams already invested in the Chef ecosystem or Ruby
  • Organizations prioritizing compliance, auditability, and reporting
  • Ops teams seeking a mature, supported automation platform

Not ideal when

  • Small projects that prefer a lightweight, agentless tool
  • Teams without Ruby expertise and limited training time
  • Environments that require a pull‑based model only
  • Organizations looking for a purely cloud‑native, serverless solution

How teams use it

Standardizing web‑server configurations

Ensures identical packages, services, and security settings across 200+ nodes

Automating database cluster provisioning

Creates repeatable, version‑controlled setups with built‑in failover scripts

Enforcing security baselines

Integrates with Chef InSpec to continuously validate compliance across the fleet

Scaling microservice deployments

Orchestrates configuration changes during rolling updates without downtime

Tech snapshot

Ruby99%
HTML1%
Shell1%
PowerShell1%
Python1%
Makefile1%

Tags

automationhacktoberfestdeploymentcfgmgtdevopschefinfrastructure

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a Chef Server to use Chef Infra?

A Chef Server provides centralized policy distribution, but Chef Infra can also run in solo mode for smaller, standalone environments.

What programming language does Chef Infra use?

Cookbooks and recipes are written in Ruby, using Chef's domain‑specific language.

How does Chef Infra differ from Chef Habitat?

Chef Infra focuses on configuration management of infrastructure, while Chef Habitat is designed for building, packaging, and running applications.

Is there a free way to learn Chef Infra?

Yes, the Learn Chef platform offers self‑paced, free training modules for Chef Infra and related tools.

What license is Chef Infra released under?

Chef Infra is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Project at a glance

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LicenseApache-2.0
Repo age17 years old
Last commit4 hours ago
Primary languageRuby

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