Preventing adding chef client configuration with knife command

Preventing adding chef client configuration with knife command

The knife command useally needs root privileges on Chef client systems not using ChefDK (read Chef Workstation). And, if the client.rb configuration is not located under the /root/.chef directory, but under /etc/chef directory then we need to type the following with a knife command:

#-> knife data bag list -c /etc/chef/client.rb

However, after doing such commands many times a day it becomes cumbersome to so so. How can we get rid of the -c /etc/chef/client.rb part?

If we tried the same command without the configuration setting we got:

#-> knife data bag list
WARNING: No knife configuration file found
WARN: Failed to read the private key /etc/chef/client.pem: #<Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory @ rb_sysopen - /etc/chef/client.pem>
ERROR: Your private key could not be loaded from /etc/chef/client.pem
Check your configuration file and ensure that your private key is readable 

Well, it seems not that difficult. The knife commands always searches the $HOME/.chef directory first for a valid client configuration file. In our case the HOME variable was translated to /root/.chef. Furthermore, if under the /root/.chef directory there is no configuration file such as config.rb, knife.rb or client.rb then we can fix this as follow:

#-> ln -s /etc/chef/client.rb /root/.chef/knife.rb

From that moment on there is no need anymore to append the -c /etc/chef/client.rb to any knife command. Great that saves me time!

Another related post I found to very useful was Configure Chef on Linux

Have fun, Gratien